Australian Book Review, June 2021 issue, no. 432 by Australian Book Review

Advances Bustin’ out all over

Voila! At least we have an extra issue, something we’ve wanted to effect for several years. No longer will readers have to endure winter with a June–July double issue of the magazine. A discrete July issue will follow. We hope you enjoy the extra issue. It’s slightly different in composition from other ones, with more creative writing, several commentaries, and longer review essays, such as Declan Fry’s questioning reading of two new books by Stan Grant, and Lisa Gorton’s brilliant study of the new translation of Beowulf. Hessom Razavi – the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow – continues his series of essays about Australia’s binary myth about people seeking asylum. In this chapter, Dr Razavi draws on conversations with a dozen journalists, lawyers, psychologists, people working with refugees, and Behrouz Boochani himself, now settled in New Zealand after his own long incarceration on Manus Island. Ilana Snyder – long-time contributor to and board member of ABR – writes about the recent infernal imbroglio in Gaza (stilled, if only temporarily, as we go to press). Ilana is head of the New Israel Fund Australia. Martin Thomas – past winner of the Calibre Essay Prize, currently based at King’s College London, where he co-directs the Menzies Australia Institute – revisits Patrick White thirty-one years after his death and asks why White – the only Australian to win the Nobel Prize for literature ( J.M. Coetzee moved to Australia after winning his) – is now so little read or heeded. Professor Thomas concludes that White’s supranational outlook and his reluctance to define himself as ‘Australian’ are among the reasons why he has receded from view. He suspects that White, surveying us from ‘some gumtree in the sky’, would be ‘bathing in the lack of glory’ – perverse and utterly individual to the last. This extra issue is only possible in this form – and without a hike in the subscription cost – because of the generous support of Matthew Sandblom and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund. We thank them warmly. We hope you enjoy the June issue.

Their stinking crew

Gregory Kratzmann, who has died aged seventy-four after a brief illness, was a frequent contributor to the magazine from 2006 to 2012 (he wrote for us eighteen times). Almost thirty years ago, our Editor commissioned Kratzmann – a medievalist who taught English at La Trobe University – to write the biography of Gwen Harwood, who was to die a couple of years later, in 1995. Gwen loved the idea, and the two became great friends and confidants. Unfortunately, the OUP biography never eventuated. Kratzmann, despite his subject’s enthusiasm, ran into obstacles of a kind familiar to many modern biographers.

Kratzmann went on to co-edit (with Alison Hoddinott) Harwood’s Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003). He also edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1955 (2001), surely among the most brilliant letters ever penned in this country. Happily for us, a biography is now in sight. Ann-Marie Priest is the author, and Black Inc. will publish it next year. In this issue, Priest writes about Gwen Harwood’s succession of brilliant hoaxes, raids on literary targets, and noms de plume. Most famous or notorious of the former was L’Affaire Bulletin (as Harwood dubbed it), when Harwood – frustrated by editorial favouritism and condescension to female poets from Hobart – published two poems in the Bulletin under the guise of ‘Walter Lehmann’. Only later did Donald Horne, ‘hapless’ editor of the Bulletin, realise that the poems were acrostics: they read ‘So long Bulletin’ and ‘Fuck all editors’. Horne was, shall we say, unimpressed, but Gwen Harwood never resiled. Fifteen years later she wrote Tony Riddell: ‘Fuck all the judges and editors too, fuck all the critics and their stinking crew’.

Prizes galore

When the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Press closed in early May, we had received 1,428 entries – the same number we received in 2020. Encouragingly, more than 500 of these came from overseas – from thirty-six countries in all. International interest in our three prizes, and by extension the magazine itself, is growing all the time, with major benefits for our contributors, for authors and publishers featured in the magazine – and for ABR. Judging is now underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted short stories in our August issue. The Calibre Essay Prize has taken longer than expected because of an illness in the Editor’s family which has greatly restricted the time available for extracurricular tasks. The judging is being finalised now. We will publish the winning essay in the July issue. We’re grateful to entrants for their forbearance. Meanwhile the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the oldest of our prizes, will open in mid-July. It’s the eighteenth time we have presented a poetry prize, which now honours the memory of another magnificent Australian poet.

Melbourne Prize for Literature

Entries are open for the triennial 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature. This time, the categories have changed. Victorian writers can now enter their work for the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, the $15,000 Writers Prize, and the new $20,000 Professional Development Award. Entries close on 19 July, and the finalists will be announced in September, followed by the winners in November. See www.melbourneprize.org for more information. g AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Australian Book Review June 2021, no. 432

First series 1961–74 | Second series (1978 onwards, from no. 1) Registered by Australia Post | Printed by Doran Printing ISSN 0155-2864 ABR is published eleven times a year by Australian Book Review Inc., which is an association incorporated in Victoria, registered no. A0037102Z. Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Twitter: @AustBookReview Facebook: @AustralianBookReview Instagram: @AustralianBookReview Postal address: Studio 2, 207 City Road, Southbank, Vic. 3006 This is a Creative Spaces studio. Creative Spaces is a program of Arts Melbourne at the City of Melbourne. www.australianbookreview.com.au Peter Rose |Editor and CEO editor@australianbookreview.com.au Amy Baillieu | Deputy Editor abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil | Digital Editor digital@australianbookreview.com.au James Jiang | ABR Editorial Cadet assistant@australianbookreview.com.au Grace Chang | Business Manager business@australianbookreview.com.au Christopher Menz | Development Consultant development@australianbookreview.com.au Poetry Editor John Hawke (with assistance from Anders Villani) Chair Sarah Holland-Batt Treasurer Peter McLennan Board Members Graham Anderson, Declan Fry, Billy Griffiths, Johanna Leggatt, Sharon Pickering, Robert Sessions, Ilana Snyder ABR Laureates David Malouf (2014) | Robyn Archer (2016) ABR Rising Stars Alex Tighe (NSW, 2019) | Sarah Walker (Vic., 2019) Declan Fry (Vic., 2020)

Acknowledgment of Country Australian Book Review acknowledges the Traditional Owners of the Kulin Nation as Traditional Owners of the land on which it is situated in Southbank, Victoria, and pays respect to the Elders, past and present. ABR writers similarly acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the lands on which they live. Subscriptions One year (print + online): $95 | One year (online only): $70 Subscription rates above are for individuals in Australia. All prices include GST. More information about subscription rates, including international, concession, and institutional rates is available: www.australianbookreview.com.au Email: business@australianbookreview.com.au Phone: (03) 9699 8822 Cover Image The Al Khaldi Mosque looking out to the Mediterranean Sea in the Gaza Strip, Palestine, 2014. (Craig Stennett/Alamy) Cover Design Jack Callil Letters to the Editor We welcome succinct letters and online comments. Letters and comments are subject to editing. Correspondents must provide contact details: letters@australianbookreview.com.au Publicity & Advertising Amy Baillieu – abr@australianbookreview.com.au Jack Callil – digital@australianbookreview.com.au Media Kit available from our website. Environment Australian Book Review is printed by Doran Printing, an FSC® certified printer (C005519). Doran Printing uses clean energy provided by Hydro Tasmania. All inks are soy-based, and all paper waste is recycled to make new paper products.

Monash University Interns Clarissa Cornelius Volunteers Alan Haig, John Scully Contributors The ❖ symbol next to a contributor’s name denotes that it is their first appearance in the magazine. 2 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Image credits and information

Page 35: Arched dead tree reflected in the blue waters of the Murrumbidgee River near the Australian outback town of Hay, New South Wales, 2017 (Stephanie Jackson/Alamy) Page 57: BEWARE, MY LOVELY, Ida Lupino, Robert Ryan, 1952 (Everett Collection, Inc. /Alamy)

ABR June 2021 LETTERS

J.T. Barbarese, James Ley

COMMENTARY

7 12 26 27 44 49

Declan Fry Ilana Snyder Peter McPhee Hessom Razavi Martin Thomas Ann-Marie Priest

The gospel of Stan Grant The cycle of conflict in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine Protecting the National Archives of Australia The split state Patrick White thirty years on The parodic inventiveness of Gwen Harwood

HISTORY

Marilyn Lake

Tom Griffiths

Black, White and Exempt edited by Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones Inga Clendinnen edited by James Boyce

POEMS

11 33 41

Sarah Holland-Batt Omar Sakr Derrick Austin

‘The Gift’ ‘What Distance Burns’ ‘Miracle Play’

FEMINISM

Zora Simic

Megan Clement

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel and Why We Lost the Sex Wars by Lorna Bracewell The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing edited by Hannah Dawson

ENVIRONMENT

James Boyce

Toxic by Richard Flanagan

POLITICS

Paul D. Williams

How Good Is Scott Morrison? by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen

BIOGRAPHY

Seumas Spark

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack by Resi Schwarzbauer with Chris Bell

INTERVIEW

Stan Grant

Open Page

FICTION

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J.R. Burgmann Valentina Gosetti Jane Sullivan Yen-Rong Wong Georgia White

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer On the Line by Joseph Ponthus, translated by Stephanie Smee Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss One Hundred Days by Alice Pung The Serpent’s Skin by Erina Reddan, Other People’s Houses by Kelli Hawkins, and Sargasso by Kathy George

SHORT STORY

Josephine Rowe

‘Bunker’

POETRY

53 55

Lisa Gorton James Antoniou

Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous by Mark Anthony Cayanan, Errant Night by Jerzy Beaumont, and I Said the Sea was Folded by Erik Jensen

ARTS

58 59 60 61 64 65 67

Lisa Harper Campbell Felicity Chaplin Andrew Fuhrmann A. Frances Johnson Jane Clark Jordan Prosser Ian Dickson

De Gaulle Women vs Hollywood by Helen O’Hara Berlin She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism Picturing a Nation by Gary Werskey Wakefield Fun Home

FROM THE ARCHIVE

Stephanie Trigg

‘The haunting of Gwen Harwood’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Our partners

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

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Letters In defence of Harold Bloom

Dear Editor, I wonder how much of Harold Bloom’s output, interminable if not immortal, James Ley actually knows (ABR, May 2021). Bloom’s earliest books – The Visionary Company, Shelley’s Mythmaking, and The Anxiety of Influence – were ground-breaking as well as rather gutsy for American readers. The Visionary Company included Hart Crane – famously dismissed by R.P. Blackmur – as the only American poet in a book containing readings of the canonical British Romantics. It not only in a sense reintroduced the culture to Romanticism but re-welcomed Crane to a conversation dominated by slavish worship of Modernism, especially T.S. Eliot. I remember reading it when I was twenty, instantly confirmed in my own passion for Crane, the joy of one’s youth (but of nobody else I knew at the time). Bloom’s book on Shelley makes the case, now routinely made by others, that Shelley was among the great religious poets. As for Anxiety, whatever its idiosyncrasies, it changed the vocabulary of literary criticism and extended the range of psychological criticism, and especially of Northrop Fry’s anatomies (Fry was Bloom’s teacher). That book, weird as it is, has always been more important to poets and artists than to critics of literature, especially academicians who are frankly frightened by its central claim, not because it is incontestable but because it eliminates ‘source hunting’ from serious consideration. It’s hard to see how this ‘thoroughly institutionalised creature’ was that at all. The institution could only contain him by isolating him safely from the rest of the institution (he was not an official member of Yale’s English Department), but could hardly justify ridding itself of this brilliant nuisance, who taught his courses without a book, reciting from Shakespeare, Yeats, etc. As for his ‘assertions’ of the value of literature in a ‘democratic age’, that’s simply not borne out by the range of his work’s interests. Listen to Bloom on Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison or Emily Dickinson. Poetry has no politics, or if it has, it is not ‘democratic’. Art is not a democracy. In his Autobiographies,

Helen Anne Bell Poetry Bequest Award 2021 We invite women poets to submit a collection of poems between 50 to 80 pages for this $40,000 prize. Entries close 20 August 2021. APPLY NOW

slamsydney.submittable.com/submit/

6 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

CRICOS 00026A

and long before the muse of ugliness ruined his prose, Yeats says that ‘intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible’. Whether it is applicable to the crises of the moment, crises of representation and identity, it is still worth considering. J.T. Barbarese, Rutgers University, USA

James Ley replies

I thank Professor Barbarese for taking the time to respond to my article. I am well aware that Bloom’s stance was grounded in his love of Romantic poetry and that his early criticism was forged in opposition to the anti-Romantic Eliotian orthodoxy that was pervasive at the time. I pointed this out in a review of an earlier book by Bloom, in this very publication (ABR, April 2016). There is no denying he was a singular figure; I am, however, inclined to take the fact that his ideas were shaped in opposition to the institutional culture he first encountered in the 1950s as confirmation of my basic point. If the author of The Necessity of Atheism can be reinterpreted as a religious poet, then surely it is not too much of a stretch to describe a critic who spent his entire adult life on the faculty at Yale disagreeing with his fellow academics as ‘institutionalised’. I am not an ‘academician’, which is perhaps why I am not at all frightened by Bloom’s ideas; I simply find them implausible. The breadth of his reading is not the issue, nor is it in question. My objection is the narrowness of his interpretative focus and the cloistered view of literature he advanced. I trust I am not misunderstanding Professor Barbarese when I take his claim about the undemocratic nature of art to be affirming the notion that all writers are not created equal. I suppose there is something a bit undemocratic about the fact most of us will never be as good at writing poetry as Shelley. But art is democratic in the sense that it is available to everyone and addresses a common reality. One can only imagine that the author of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ would be astonished at the suggestion that poetry has no politics. As for Yeats’s claim that intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible, I respectfully submit that it is complete nonsense.

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Comment

The gospel of Stan Questions of history and identity

by Declan Fry

希望本是无所谓有，无所谓无的。这正如地上的路；其实地上本没有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。 Hope is an intangible thing. It cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is like a path. Originally, there is none – but as many people come and go, a path appears. Lu Xun, ‘My Old Home’ We both unsettled when the boats came.

et’s start with a portrait. The year is 1993. The book is My Kind of People. Its author is Wayne Coolwell, a journalist. Who are Coolwell’s kind of people? Ernie Dingo, for one. Sandra Eades. Noel Pearson. Archie Roach. And there, sandwiched between opera singer Maroochy Barambah and dancer Linda Bonson is Stan Grant, aged thirty. Circa 1993, Grant is a breakthrough television presenter and journalist whose mother remembers him coming home to read the newspaper while the other kids went to play footy. ‘[T]here was a maturity and a sense of order about him,’ Coolwell writes. The order belies his parents’ life of ‘tin humpies, dirt floors, and usually only the one bed for all the kids in the family’. They are unable to afford a football (Grant relies on rolled-up socks). His sister, one of three siblings, sleeps on a fold-out table. In one house, they have to chase away a group of occupying emus before they can move in. A formative experience follows the family’s move from Griffith to Canberra: Grant gives a speech to his English class on poet (and relative) Kevin Gilbert. The teacher adores it; the kids are confused. Grant does not fit the stereotype of what an Aboriginal should be. ‘He was not going to be pigeonholed,’ Coolwell writes. Thirty years before Sheila Heti, Grant’s audience found themselves confronting a question that would come to preoccupy

Briggs, ‘The Children Came Back’

the young man addressing them: how should a Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi person be? For fifty-seven years, Grant has sought to live life on his own terms. The bibliography begins in 2002, with The Tears of Strangers. It is perhaps his most successful work. Many of Grant’s preoccupations and approaches appear here, fully formed: the fascination with Jimmy Governor, on whom Thomas Keneally’s Jimmie Blacksmith character is based; the struggle with how Black and white Australia are implicated in one another (and eager to essentialise and dissemble their differences). Even something as simple and apparently inconsequential as a William Blake epigraph from ‘Auguries of Innocence’ will later appear, unchanged, in a Q&A episode, with Bruce Pascoe and others in 2021. In 2016, Talking to My Country is published. Here, the authorial mode for which Grant has become primarily known arrives: channelling James Baldwin, passionately struggling with his country. Enlisting a small army of references to Enlightenment philosophers, he goes and tells it on the mountain – and on the TV, the front pages of newspapers, the radio. The previous year, he appears at the National Press Club. My people die younger, he says. Ziggy Ramo samples the speech on his début EP. Some three AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

decades after he first appeared on Seven’s Current Affairs show Real Miles Franklin-winning ‘identity novel’, The Yield (2019). Grant Life, the gospel of Stan has begun featuring on hip-hop records. views it as overly reliant on post-My Place ‘homecoming’ tropes A short reflection, On Identity, together with another book that seek to locate identity in the past – ‘the search, the return of journalism-cum-memoir, Australia Day, appear in 2019. In home, to reclaim language or name’. Grant cannot even bring the both he refers to author Kim Scott’s memoir, Kayang and himself to write about the grandfather and family of Winch’s Me (2005). It contains a question that has long troubled Grant: novel without cordoning them off behind scare quotes. You can ‘You can’t be a bit and bit. What are you, Noongar or wadjella?’ practically see the grimace on his lips when he writes: ‘Being ‘It seems to me a cruel question,’ Grant remarks in On Thomas Wiradjuri is not something I rediscover; our language lives in the Keneally (Black Inc., $17.99 hb, 90 pp). ‘It comes with [...] as- now, not in the then. But for Tara – like Thomas Keneally, like sumptions of power: we will tell you who you are and whether you Kim Scott, like the judges of the High Court – being Aboriginal belong; we will determine your belongs to a time past, a connecidentity; you will answer to us.’ tion severed and then recovered Though shorter than With and rescued; a time before mothe Falling of the Dusk (Harperdernity and held out of reach of modernity.’ Collins, $34.99 pb, 320 pp), On Yet the influence of Bruce Thomas Keneally is perhaps the Pascoe across this continent, better – and more provocative – of including among Aboriginal and the two books. I would not deny Torres Strait Islander communithat Dusk is a fine introduction to ties, would be churlish to deny. geopolitics for those unfamiliar Yes, his writing has been critiqued with the countries Grant surveys, for relying on white referents. Yes, but it offers little novelty to those he is not saying anything that already acquainted. In On Thomas was not already known, either by Keneally, the engagement with historians or the First Nations he Grant’s real preoccupations, his refers to. But those two sleights Scylla and Charybdis, is sharper. of hand are part of what has In rough order of importance, given the book such wide appeal these are History and Identity. and made it influential. Big Bill As he wrote in Australia Day, Neidjie might have more philoGrant comes from ‘the struggle sophical import; The Biggest Estate for identity of a people whose on Earth might be more cerebral; identities have often been defined neither have sold hundreds of – indeed legislated – by others, thousands of copies. Interestingly, with often devastating personal Grant’s critique recalls Mudroocost’. He is angry and he is weary roo’s of Sally Morgan not being – and wary. He fears becoming a Black enough: in both cases, the ‘man of ressentiment’, for whom critique was mounted based on ‘the unquenchable thirst [is] for the idea that the books appealed revenge; the refusal to let go; suftoo much to whiteness. Certainly fering [at] the core of his identity there is some validity in this. But [...] a prisoner of his past, caught it also doesn’t account for how in a time warp’. First Nations in some instances Much of the conversation read and take up these books, as around the On Thomas Keneally well as the influence they have will come, I suspect, from its on the wider reading public and engagement with that warp. It their ability to shift and move the sees Grant critique both an oldStan Grant at the première of The Australian Dream at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival ( Igor Vidyashev/Alamy) conversation in productive and er (Bruce Pascoe) and younger unpredictable ways. (Tara June Winch) generation If readers are surprised by Grant’s criticism of other Aboriof authors. Pascoe, Grant suggests, is too ready to give in to the urge to perform, to play to the crowd: ‘I can see in him ginal authors, they have not been paying attention. It is there something of the old-time carny [...] a spruiker in a travel- in the very opening chapter of The Tears of Strangers, in the avid ling medicine show’. He prefers, he says (pace his fellow 2016 disgust and self-flagellation he registers toward his identity NSW Premier’s Literary Awards judge, Thomas Keneally), as a successful Black individual. The reasoning that galvanises Ellen van Neerven’s Heat and Light, ‘a dazzling work of fiction these critiques has varied in emphasis over the years, but largely I considered of greater depth and literary worth than Dark remained consistent. To take some illustrative quotes from ‘You Emu’. Winch, meanwhile, is criticised for playing it safe in her Can’t Be A Bit and Bit’, one of On Thomas Keneally’s key chapters: 8 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

The white poets who ‘imagine’ Australia into being can’t escape their own illegitimacy, just like the nation they write about. […] We ask Aboriginal people to dance for us, paint for us, run for us, but we have never said to them: ‘This is your country, may we live here, please?’ […] Those Indigenous writers by my bedside are trapped in a conversation with whiteness. [...] These black writers are my people in a way that the other Australian writers on my bedside table cannot be. And yet ... I feel trapped here too. I feel compelled to choose in ways that suffocate me. […] the need to prove we exist to a people who don’t truly see us. We are called on to perform authenticity: to be recognised, we have to be recognisable. […] It is a role [Pascoe] seems to revel in, carefully cultivating his public image […] an illusion for a white audience […] [offering] white Australians something they so desperately desire: absolution. […] They can even imagine themselves as Aboriginal people.

This is the stuff of Grant’s nightmares. Herein lies the paradox – elsewhere in his writing on the imbrications of Black and white, Grant poses a simple question: do we have to choose? Why not accept the fact of overlapping yet contradictory affinities without turning to a fantasised wholeness, an essence that erases and recolonises even as it offers comfort and belonging to the settler or Black artist happy to write and perform in bad faith: one with a view to an empty, too easy reconciliation; the other with a disingenuous sense of cultural essentialism and singularity. Grant won’t play the yidaki or make dot paintings or read Claudia Rankine’s Citizen or speak Wiradjuri because you ask him too, or thinks you might expect him to. But if he personally decides to do these things? Well, then he just might. His mode is distempered, angry, plaintive, perennially at odds with Black and white alike; an exile and journeyman, searching outside Australia for something of both his country and himself. One minute Grant will tell you of ‘a lost continent’ where ‘sovereignty resides in the First People; where we tell our stories in the first languages’; the next, insist ‘I have no need of authors, black or white, who tell me I must go back to find myself, that I can become whole in language or country or history.’ Grant, in other words, is someone who will tell you exactly who he is, just so long as he doesn’t think you are trying to tell him first. There is an echo here of the boy in the Canberra schoolroom, railing against the ignorance of his classmates, the cool enclosures of terra nullius and narrow conceptions of Aboriginality – while also knowing that anger is an hourglass through which the sand threatens to never stop pouring. It’s Whitmanesque, really. Does he contradict himself ? Well, then he contradicts himself. Or not: the implication, as I read it, is that although we have never lived a continent of Indigenous languages, of agreement between coloniser and First Nations, and perhaps never can – not so late in history, so late in the goddamned day – we still have to grapple with the broken and surviving histories we have inherited. As Grant admits, briefly: ‘I too sell to whiteness.’ It is a shared entrapment, albeit one he has arrived at differently from Winch or Pascoe or Scott. He is fond of recounting contemporary French philosopher Pascal Bruckner’s description of liberalism as ‘a jailer – but one who slips you the key’. This is the cosmopolitan ideal of cultural syncretism, allowing people to live with difference, to speak across incommensurabilities and to honour the multitudes

that they contain: as individuals, families, communities, countries.

He is angry and he is weary – and wary. He fears becoming a ‘man of ressentiment’ Yet if there is one word that might describe the cadence, the cumulative effect of Grant’s work to date, it is this: aggrieved. He’s not angry, just disappointed. ‘Don’t tell me, Tom, that you would not write Jimmie Blacksmith today. Don’t tell me it is not your place to write about Aboriginal people or in an Aboriginal voice. You have.’ Forget about asking permission – since when have other Australian writers bothered? We cannot police our imaginations, Grant says, paraphrasing Rankine. And what, Grant suggests, if we see them and our country more clearly because of it? The truth will set you free; but first it will piss you off. So let it, Grant says. Live with the difficulty. We don’t need to be completed or healed – just allowed ‘to live with all the pain; with all the broken bits’. As Natsume Sōseki’s protagonist is told by an old gentleman he encounters on a train in the opening of his 1908 classic Sanshirō, ‘Tokyo is bigger than Kumamoto. And Japan is bigger than Tokyo. And even bigger than Japan ... Even bigger than Japan is the inside of your head. Don’t ever surrender yourself – not to Japan, not to anything.’ For First Nations, and anyone else on this continent who wishes to keep their eyes open, sovereignty of mind is the biggest estate going. Grant’s critique of Jimmie Blacksmith’s emptiness, his existential void, is that he lacks the keys to the estate. Blacksmith, he says, has no telos, no sovereignty of mind or self. He is a paid-up member of ‘that country we have never written’; of the Aboriginal peoples who did not exist pre-colonisation because they were, and are, a European invention. Jimmie’s passport, to borrow the Derridean formulation, has yet to turn up in the mail. It never will. If it were up to him, the reader imagines, Grant would probably say that Jimmie has no need to wait; that the most colonial and racist part of that continent called Australia is its desire, since invasion, to always be waiting. It would rather assimilate or kill off First Nations, or attach itself to England or the United States, then face its fictions. To paraphrase the Nobel Prize Academy’s citation for Patrick White, a new continent is advertised as being written and introduced into world literature every day – when there is no new continent to write. No forest to clear; no Stan Parker to bury the axe. Australia is already full. So quit waiting, Jimmie, hoping your passport will arrive. As Murrandoo Yanner recalled Tracker Tilmouth telling his community (recorded by Alexis Wright in Tracker [2017]): ‘If you think you’ve got sovereignty then don’t talk about it, act like it. [...] What are you waiting for? Are you going to kneel down and have the white man tap you on the shoulder with a sword and say, Arise ye Aborigine, I now recognise thee?’ g Declan Fry is a writer, essayist, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. He is an ABR Rising Star. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

History

‘I intend to do for myself ’ Examining Indigenous lives under exemption Marilyn Lake

Black, White and Exempt: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives under exemption edited by Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones

Aboriginal Studies Press $39.95 pb, 224 pp

n the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subject to the forced removal of their children by state authorities. Exemption certificates promised family safety, dignity, a choice of work, a passport to travel, and freedom. Too often, in practice, exemption also meant enhanced surveillance, family breakup, and new forms of racial discrimination and social segregation. In 1934, a petition was presented to the West Australian Royal Commission, a body appointed to investigate matters in relation to the condition and treatment of Aboriginal Australians by a group of women calling themselves the ‘Halfcastes of Broome’. They detailed the demeaning consequences for their employment and marriage prospects, and the familial hardships entailed in living under ‘the Aborigine Act’. ‘We ask for our freedom,’ they wrote, ‘so that when the chance comes along we can rule our lives and make ourselves true and good citizens.’ In Western Australia, the Aborigines Act 1905 provided for exemption but, as the petitioners noted, this could be cancelled at the whim of police, who constantly demanded ‘favours’ of the women and punished them if they refused. One of the women’s requests was that male police be replaced by ‘lady protectors’. In the Northern Territory, where Indigenous peoples (including those of mixed descent) were governed by the Commonwealth Aboriginal Ordinance of 1918, the Australian Halfcaste Progressive Association (AHPA) was active alongside the Northern Australian Workers’ Union in mobilising a campaign to amend the Commonwealth Ordinance to provide for ‘exemption certificates’ following the model of the 1897 Queensland Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act. As Leonie Stevens reports in Black, White and Exempt, a path-breaking collection of essays on the Indigenous experience of exemption across four Australian jurisdictions, the political campaign for exemption in the Northern Territory was led by William Ah Mat, a local football legend and secretary of the AHPA. What they longed for, he explained, was ‘to be free from the Aboriginal Act to control their own destiny and affairs’. His people wanted full citizen rights, he told the federal Minister for the Interior, 10 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

Thomas Paterson. In 1936, the Ordinance was duly amended to offer the possibility of exemption to some individuals of mixed descent. As anthropologist A.P. Elkin later commented to Robert Menzies, exemption turned ‘black into white’, but it was a provisional whiteness, always able to be revoked by the Chief Protector. Black, White and Exempt is an engaging historical collection that seeks to illuminate ‘the lived experience of exemption’ and the agency of Aboriginal people themselves as they negotiated with authorities for their freedom and agitated for reform. In attending to the complexity and diversity of Aboriginal lives in the twentieth century, and in drawing on a mix of oral sources, personal family accounts, and archival research, the editors, Lucinda Aberdeen and Jennifer Jones, have produced an exemplary work of history, alert to ambiguity and ambivalence. Accompanying photographs render individual stories vivid and intensely personal. The book deserves a wide readership. Originating in a symposium in 2018 led by Indigenous researchers and Elders Kella Robinson and Judi Wickes at La Trobe University’s Shepparton Campus in Yorta Yorta Country in regional Victoria, this collection introduces us to a range of different stories and viewpoints. The subject matter was difficult and its legacies remain controversial. The involvement of Elders and community members ensured, the editors report, that ‘the symposium reflected First Nations’ cultural values and priorities’. As a joint production of Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers and writers, the book is a triumph. Interestingly, all but one of the eleven contributors are women. John Maynard, a Worimi man from the Port Stephens area of New South Wales and Chair of Aboriginal History at Newcastle University, provided a keynote address to the symposium – another was presented by La Trobe University historian Katherine Ellinghaus – and spoke of the persistence of racial segregation in New South Wales in the twentieth century regardless of the possibilities of exemption. His grandfather Fred Maynard was a founder of the Australian Aborigines Progressive Association, which sought full citizen rights for Indigenous peoples in a framework of declared self-determination. The Aboriginal desire for self-determination – the desire to rule their own lives – is a key theme of the collection. Jessica Horton writes of the activism of Victorian Aboriginal families who pursued pathways to ‘self-determined exemption’ in order to be free from the control of the Victorian Board for the Protection of Aborigines. ‘I intend to go off the Boards hands altogether and do for myself,’ one man wrote. ‘I want to make a home for my children.’ The obligation of breadwinning was a common motivation among Aboriginal men. In a collaborative chapter, ‘Playing the Game’, Lucinda Aberdeen, Kella Robinson, and Judi Wickes write about the experience of exemption in Queensland and New South Wales with reference to the lives of Wickes’s grandfather Roy Smith, exempted in Queensland in 1926, and Robinson’s grandfather Alf Kelly, exempted in New South Wales in 1945. In Queensland, Roy Smith wanted to live and work as a free man. His wife, Daisy, kept diaries that show that ‘the Smith family was free to vote, go to the movies, travel on public transport, visit family and friends, as well as entertain at home’. In New South Wales, where exemption was introduced much later than in Queensland, Alf

Kelly managed to forge an independent career as a ‘boss drover’, but his constant movement, in part to keep his children safe, disrupted their schooling and removed them from Country and kin. On the other hand, rural mobility also enabled men like Kelly to return to Country. In retirement, Kelly applied for exemption to obtain the old-age pension. There were advantages to exemption, but Wickes and Robinson along with other authors note that the cost – the loss of Aboriginal community, identity, and storylines – was significant. In her excellent overview of exemption policies in Australia, Ellinghaus notes the light they throw on the development of

racialised thinking. However, the conditions of exemption also illuminated the possibilities and limits of thinking about citizenship as it was understood for most of the twentieth century. Not until the final decades did recognition of the importance of Aboriginal attachment to land, culture, and identity, and new ideas about multiculturalism, enable citizenship to be reimagined as a condition that embraced difference, rather than repressing and assimilating it. g Marilyn Lake’s most recent book is Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 2019).

The Gift

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair garlanded by summer hibiscus like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche. A flowering wreath buzzes around his head – passionate red. He holds the gift of death in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black. He has been waiting seventeen years to open it and is impatient. When I ask how he is my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation, the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly as a nurse measuring drops of calamine from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle to see my father weeping this freely, weeping for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate, his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone as the cold currents whirl around him – crying one minute, sedate the next. But today my father is disconsolate. I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again. I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade. I hate myself for noticing his poetry – the triplet that should not be beautiful to my ear but is. Day, year, decade – scale of awful economy. I want to give him his present but it is not mine to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating the moment we can open his present together – first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it, then me helping him peel back the paper, the weight of his death knocking, and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine, I will carry the gift of his death endlessly, every day I will know it opening in me.

Sarah Holland-Batt Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent collection is The Hazards (2015). This poem first appeared in the New Yorker. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Comment

Neighbour against neighbour The cycle of conflict in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine

by Ilana Snyder

he Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a neverending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of fullscale wars, with immense suffering on both sides. In recent years, particularly in the context of Gaza, every component of the cycle is familiar: Palestinian deaths far outnumber Israeli ones; dismaying images of flattened buildings; the grief of those who have lost loved ones. Outside the Middle East, reporters, politicians, and community leaders present their arguments, often ignoring the losses of those on the other side. Next comes the ceasefire, mediated by some combination of the United States, Egypt, and Qatar. Quiet returns. Hamas – the militant Islamist faction that took control of Gaza in a bloody coup from its Palestinian rivals, Fatah, in 2007 – is satisfied that it has asserted itself once more as the leader of the Palestinians. Israel is satisfied that it has ‘mown the lawn’, cutting back Hamas’s military capability. Things return to the status quo – until the next outbreak. This time the cycle erupted in May, rapidly escalating into the most intense flare-up since the 2014 Gaza war. Hamas in Gaza fired rockets indiscriminately at Israeli cities and Israel responded with massive airstrikes. As I write, a ceasefire is expected at any moment, but so far 232 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed in Israeli airstrikes and twelve people in Israel by rocket barrages fired by Palestinian militants. The storm of Hamas rockets is aimed only at civilians; it has been criticised by Human Rights Watch, alleging it is a war crime, and is part of an investigation underway at the International Criminal Court. Israel targets military and terrorist installations, but due to Gaza’s density and the immense power of the airstrikes, the civilian toll is massive. On this occasion the Associated Press and Al Jazeera’s offices were also bombed; Israel claimed the building served as a Hamas intelligence post. Israel’s previous actions have also been the subject of HRW reports and ICC investigations. 12 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

The violence erupted after growing tension in Jerusalem. At the start of Ramadan in April, Israeli police placed barricades outside the Old City’s Damascus Gate, one of the few public spaces available to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Although Israel removed the barriers, those initial confrontations led to more widespread violence in Jerusalem and along the border with Gaza. The conflagration continued into May leading up to Jerusalem Day, which typically results in violence as Jewish nationalists march through the Muslim Quarter. To avert confrontations in an already incendiary situation, Israeli security agencies rerouted the march and forbade Jewish worshipers from visiting the Temple Mount. The Flag Parade was finally dispersed by police after sirens sounded over Jerusalem as Hamas launched rockets at the city and southern Israel. At the same time, heightened tension in Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, where Palestinian families face eviction from their homes due to legal claims by Jewish settlers, contributed to the escalation of violence in the city. The case led to clashes between activists and police that garnered international attention. Israel’s High Court of Justice recently postponed a hearing on the eviction of three families who will remain in their homes until a new hearing date is set. What makes this latest flare-up radically different and far more frightening than prior rounds of conflict is the increase in intercommunal violence within the mixed Jewish-Arab Israeli cities. The intercommunal violence has pitted Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel against one another on streets where they have lived side by side for decades. It’s neighbour against neighbour now. This has shocked many Jewish Israelis who have told themselves that Arab citizens are not like other Palestinians, that they do not have the same sense of national identity, that their goal is to enjoy economic parity with the eighty per cent of the population who are Jewish. But the current violence has shattered that illusion. Some observers are calling the past few weeks of unprecedented violence in Lod, Acre, Ramle, and Haifa a civil war within Israel itself. The more than one million Palestinians who live inside Israel

have Israeli citizenship. They vote in Israeli elections and work side by side with Jewish Israelis, but they experience inequality, racism, and discrimination on a daily basis. There can be no doubt that the identity of Palestinians inside Israel is deeply connected to those in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere.

What makes this latest flare-up far more frightening than prior rounds of conflict is the increase in intercommunal violence Perhaps this was inevitable, but it is nonetheless shocking to see video images of lynch mobs roaming the streets of Israel’s cities chanting ‘Death to Arabs’. Young Jewish men in a neighbourhood of Tel Aviv surrounded a car and assaulted the Arab driver, with no police in sight. An Arab man was shot dead in Lod, a mixed city near Tel Aviv. Arab rioters in Lod set fire to synagogues and burned cars. In mixed towns all around Israel, the violence has become one of ethnic conflict. The streets in cities like Jaffa remain almost empty, with people afraid to walk outside alone. For many, the past weeks have been a reminder of the fragile basis of Jewish-Arab coexistence. Part of the explanation is that in Israel it is the Jewish Israelis who have the most power and influence: they control the government, the news, the army experience and the education system that shape the world view of all Israelis. Another part of the explanation is the dissemination of hatred towards Israel’s Arab citizens by many of Israel’s leaders. In 2009, Avigdor Lieberman ran a political campaign with the slogan ‘No loyalty, no citizenship’. In 2013, Naftali Bennett called Palestinians under occupation a matter of ‘shrapnel in the rear’, arguing that it would be more painful to remove them, thereby justifying his annexation policies. And in 2019, Bezalel Smotrich compared Palestinians to mosquitoes, urging the country to ‘dry the swamp’. Bennett and Smotrich were talking about the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but this distinction would not have comforted Palestinian citizens of Israel. Most significantly, in 2018 Israel passed the quasi-constitutional Nation-State Law that enshrined the secondary status of Palestinian Israelis and the Arab language. Since resuming office as prime minister in 2009, Benjamin Netanyahu has warned of the danger of Arab citizens participating in elections – ‘Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves’ – calling Arab politicians an existential threat. Netanyahu has cultivated politicians such as Bennett and Smotrich. Indeed, Bennett might have become Israel’s next prime minister had this crisis not occurred. Netanyahu has facilitated the revival of Kahanism – an alt-right Jewish supremacy ideology – in Israeli politics. Until recently, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a Kahanist in Israel’s parliament, had a portrait on his wall of Kahane disciple Baruch Goldstein, who murdered twenty-nine Muslims and wounded 125 in Hebron in 1994 as they prayed in a mosque. These politicians have unleashed the violence by spreading hatred. Their racist views, amplified in the media and legitimised by the political leadership, reached its inevitable next stage – widespread violence – as Israel’s mixed cities with large Jewish and Arab populations became scenes of 14 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

mobs and riots. Israel’s police chief blamed the Kahanist BenGvir for stoking the flames of an ‘internal intifada’, first with anti-miscegenationist marches through Jerusalem, then in Sheikh Jarrah, and now in the mixed cities. This violent upheaval within the shared cities and towns represents a critical historical juncture in Jewish-Arab relations in Israel. While shared Jewish-Arab society has grown in importance in liberal democratic circles, it has not broken through to the rest of society in a sustainable way. Israel’s conflict with Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza requires a diplomatic solution between two geopolitical entities. Even Israel’s army knows there is no military solution to the conflict. Inside Israel, the answer must be communal. The conflicts between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and between Jews and Palestinians inside Israel, are two sides of the same coin. As long as root causes – racism and hatred from both Jewish and Arab extremists, and the inequality and humiliation of half a century of Israeli occupation – remain unaddressed, violence will continue to emerge. Justice for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. Although a deepening of the military conflict is still possible, the tide may be turning inside Israel. Jews and Palestinians are already harnessing their shared political power and showing the rest of the country they refuse to succumb to narratives of hatred and fear. The violence against Palestinians in Israel led to a refusal to go back to normal, with Palestinians across Israel and the occupied territories taking part in a general strike, possibly the beginning of a mass civil rights movement that Israel’s leadership has been trying to frustrate for decades. At the same time, hundreds of Jewish Israelis held solidarity protests in cities across the country, calling for an end to the violence in Gaza and a stop to the racist incitement by the government and the media. There are always people ready to fight for civil society. Organisations such as Omdim Beyachad (Standing Together) have mobilised thousands of Jewish and Arab Israelis to show the rest of Israeli society what a shared democratic future can look like. In one action, twenty-five simultaneous rallies were held across the country, drawing artists, politicians, and citizens alike. Its social media pages have swelled with new followers, propelled by stars, including actor Natalie Portman, as Israelis seek ways to shift the narrative of the moment and to start a process of national healing. To avoid future violence, a proper reckoning is required to solve the conflict as a whole – presumably through two states for two peoples and a commitment to peace and human rights. In the meantime, the efforts of Jewish and Palestinian Israelis to build civil society based on inclusion, equality, and justice for all of Israel’s citizens provide hope for a better future. g Ilana Snyder is an emeritus professor at Monash University and President of the New Israel Fund Australia. NIF is an international organisation promoting equality and justice in Israel. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

History

A pen on fire

The enduring appeal of Inga Clendinnen Tom Griffiths

Inga Clendinnen: Selected writings edited by James Boyce

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 400 pp

t is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her books – deftly selected by James Boyce, a historian thirty years younger than Clendinnen and himself a highly original thinker and writer. As Boyce observes in his perceptive introduction, ‘Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness.’ Clendinnen constantly reminded her readers that the point of history – indeed any humanistic scholarship – is to expand and strengthen our moral imagination so that we may transcend our own identity, time, and place, and understand the experience of others. Through this process, she argued, history is conducive to civic virtue. Clendinnen took up this theme – ‘the practical usefulness of good history both morally and politically’ – in her 1999 Boyer Lectures, with which this collection begins. In 1999 she stated, ‘while I am a historian and an Australian, I am not an Australian historian’. But that was already changing, for illness had catapulted Clendinnen into ‘curing her ignorance’ of home. This book helps chart her remarkable career from devoted teacher, academic, and renowned scholar of Mesoamerican history to memoirist, public intellectual, internationally acclaimed author, and, finally, distinguished historian of her own country. Clendinnen did not learn to read until she was eight, but she went on to become a famous reader. ‘Reading’ was her scholarly technique and appeared in the title of two of her most celebrated writings: Reading the Holocaust (1998) and ‘Reading Mr Robinson’ (about George Augustus Robinson, Chief Protector of the Aborigines for Port Phillip District, an essay first published in ABR in 1995). When Clendinnen finally got the knack of reading as a child, she couldn’t believe it was legal, so subversive did it seem. Reading set her free, and in every treasured book she found ‘a voice ready and eager to talk to me’. At university she ‘wallowed in the joys of promiscuous reading’. Her teaching style was to read intensively alongside her students, endlessly discussing insights. She never got over the wonder of reading: ‘this uncarnal, intense-to-incandescent yet always accessible intimacy has no parallel in the social world, and once enjoyed it is impossible to live without’. She came to writing late, too. Her first published article

appeared when she was forty-five, and then in the next thirty years wonderful books and essays flowed from a pen on fire. Her historical vision was thus born with full confidence and maturity. She found her writing voice from her experience of teaching, for she imagined her students as her audience and journeyed companionably with them into the past, reading the evidence together. For her, ‘the core narrative was always the process of inquiry’. At the beginning of the 1990s, Clendinnen was hijacked by serious illness. As she lay in a noisy shared hospital ward waiting for a liver transplant, her writing became a desperate means of escape and survival, a kind of ‘private therapy’. From that traumatic transformation, she unfolded herself from a chrysalis into a new state of being. Strangely liberated by her illness and the blessed renewal of the transplant, Clendinnen wrote herself back into vigorous scholarship and citizenship. She delved inquisitively into her own life and the life of her country. There are five sections in this collection: Encounters in Australia, Mesoamerican explorations, Facing Gorgon (the Holocaust), On History and Writing, and On Life (and illness). The collection begins by taking us into the heart of Clendinnen’s later Australian work and then backtracks to her earliest scholarship. If you chiefly know Clendinnen through her Boyer Lectures, her reflections on the Holocaust, or her explorations of Australian history, you will be entranced to hear her familiar voice introducing you to the Aztec and Mayan worlds of the sixteenth century. Here you will find her brilliant description of the imperial city of Tenochtitlan as the Spaniards first saw it in 1519, a magnificent marvel, the greatest city in Mesoamerica and Europe, a prize to be secured for their king. In the longest piece in this collection – a 1991 article for the academic journal Representations on ‘Cortés and the Conquest of Mexico’ – Clendinnen offers a rich analysis of the ‘first great paradigm for European encounters with an organised native state’. She reveals the grip of racism and hubris on generations of written history and shows how historians have often been ‘the camp followers of the imperialists’. She then teases out the complexities of the protracted warfare between the Spanish and the Aztecs in an enthralling series of narratives. Clendinnen’s ethnographic eye, her ‘double vision’ of looking into and through the sources, and her humility in the face of mystery enable her to discover new layers of the past. She portrays the uneasy protocols of battle and sacrifice, the seemingly incomprehensible refusal of the Aztecs to accept defeat, and the startlingly different cultural conceptions of nature, animals, space, time, honour, and fate that became, as much as technology and disease, decisive in this momentous conflict. Finally, there was the awful irony that the ‘victors’, in winning the jewel of Tenochtitlan for their king, completely destroyed it. Clendinnen’s reading of the ritualised, violent encounters between the Aztec leader Moctezuma and the Spanish conquistador Cortés is echoed in her later famous analysis of the spearing of Governor Phillip at Manly Cove on 7 September 1790, which is also reproduced in this collection. Such are the rewards of reading Clendinnen’s writings on the Maya and the Aztecs alongside her other work. There are also clear correspondences between her studies of the Aztec Empire’s confronting culture of human sacrifice and her reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust. Clendinnen constantly fought against the sickening AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Feminism of curiosity and imagination in the face of bureaucratic brutality and systematic murder. Empathy and intuition failed her as a means of accessing such past experiences. To find a way forward, she introduced the legend of the Gorgon. A Gorgon was a terrible creature of ancient Greek mythology whose glance turned everything to stone. Perseus was able to slay the Gorgon Medusa by holding her reflection in his polished shield and cutting off her head. Clendinnen believed, ‘If we are to see the Gorgon sufficiently steadily to destroy it, we cannot afford to be blinded by reverence or abashed into silence or deflected into a search for reassuring myths.’ So the question she posed was this: what kind of steady, systematic scrutiny, what kind of moral intelligence, might enable us to hold this terrible thing in our contemplation? Her answer was the craft of history. Has anyone celebrated the historical method so well? Through powerful storytelling, forensic analysis of episodes, and her lovable companionship in ‘the secret society of readers’, Clendinnen inducts us in the wonders of historical thinking. She reveres historians as ‘magicians’, and tutors our sense of awe at the ‘secular resurrections’ they can conjure. She invokes a past that is powerful and ever-present: ‘its hand is on our shoulder’. Boyce reminds us that Clendinnen was a member of the celebrated ‘Melbourne Group’ of historians that came into being at La Trobe University in the 1970s and included Greg Dening, Donna Merwick, Rhys Isaac, June Philipp, and Tony Barta. They pioneered approaches to ethnographic history and took on the challenge of integrating anthropology and history by attending especially to cross-cultural encounters and episodes. In remembering Clendinnen, we honour also the work of these friends and colleagues and the inspiration they gave a generation of Australian historians. The collection ends with Clendinnen’s later writings on illness and memory. In the netherworld of the hospital, Clendinnen’s researched pasts began to interlace with her own. The deities (‘monsters of caprice’) who held sway over the Aztecs of Mexico now seemed to have her in their grip. The gruesome Aztec theatre of excising a living, beating heart from the body of a warrior became weirdly inverted in her own experience of having a living organ from a dying body installed in hers. She wrote about this paradox in her memoir Tiger’s Eye (2000) and also in an article for the Australasian Journal of Psychotherapy, which, rather wonderfully, has been included in this collection. Clendinnen happily presented herself to the psychological profession as ‘a talking document’. Clendinnen loved the way literacy connects ‘the living with the living, but also with the great company of the dead’. She cherished her friend Michel de Montaigne, who died more than four hundred years ago but who ‘is still alive to me’. She saw her art as achieving a kind of triumph over death, as denying the immutability of time. James Boyce’s selection has been made with such insight and sympathy that it produces what feels almost like a new book of Inga Clendinnen’s, a secular resurrection of its own. g Tom Griffiths is Emeritus Professor of History at the Australian National University and Chair of the Editorial Board of the Australian Dictionary of Biography. His book The Art of Time Travel: Historians and their craft (2016) includes a chapter on Inga Clendinnen. 16 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

After the revolution

Feminist challenges to contemporary sexual politics Zora Simic

Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again by Katherine Angel Verso $29.99 hb, 147 pp

Why We Lost the Sex Wars

by Lorna Bracewell University of Minnesota Press US$25.95 pb, 277 pp

mong historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’. In her timely and genuinely refreshing new book, Katherine Angel’s title, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again: Women and desire in the age of consent, nods to Foucault with good reason. Angel writes in her powerful opening chapter that the promise of good sex looms – if we get consent right. And it is women and girls who bear the burden of what Foucault called the ‘incitement to discourse’. Under the terms of what Angel labels ‘consent culture’, ‘women’s speech about their desire is both demanded and idealised, touted as a marker of progressive politics’. When it comes to good sex, women must know and say what they do or don’t want.The 1970s feminist mantra ‘No Means No’ has given way to ‘enthusiastic consent’ – a fine idea in theory – but as Angel points out, it is not always easy for women to work out what they want sexually, and even if they do ‘enthusiastically consent’, they can be punished for it, and often are, one way or another. For instance, the emphasis in rape and sexual assault trials on ‘whether a victim consented to sexual activity’, rather than ‘whether the act took place’, often works against women who exhibit in any way ‘a confident desire for sex’. From another direction, the woman who is uncertain about her sexual desires is pathologised, and it is up to her to fix it – otherwise she remains doomed to ‘bad sex’. Angel’s concern is not with disavowing consent, which is, after all, a ‘bare minimum’. Instead, she interrogates consent and its limits in the interests of advancing sexual ethics beyond their current impasse. In doing so, she joins others on similar quests, including Michaela Coel, creator and star of the British television series I May Destroy You (2020), a polyphonic examination of all kinds of sex not always easily reducible to consenting or not, and gender and sexuality scholar Joseph J. Fischel, author of

Screw Consent: A better politics of sexual justice (2019). Angel cites both approvingly, while staking out her own specific terrain. She questions what it means to consent to sex, and to express desire, in a sexual culture so infinitely loaded against female sexuality. From this starting point, Angel considers the proximity of sex to violence and questions the ‘truths’ of sex research, including the enduring maxim that if women just got in touch with their bodies, sexual pleasure would be theirs. Within the limits she sets herself – or perhaps more accurately, the limits of contemporary sexual knowledge about heterosexuality and binary male and female sexuality – Angel does much more than merely refresh what has become a tired conversation about consent. In the final chapter, Angel flips the scripts of consent culture, ‘confidence feminism’, and the edicts of sex research. Against these forces, she acknowledges the vulnerability of all people when it comes to sex. Her ‘utopian horizon’ is the surrender of the ‘illusion that any of us have real, or total, power when it comes to pleasure and sex’. Apart from an occasional misstep – in an uncharacteristically narrow interpretation, Angel says that masturbation is clearly ‘not sex’, a suggestion that would outrage feminist sex educator Betty Dodson if she were still alive – her conclusions, and the many insights and well executed arguments throughout, are welcome interventions, especially given how low the bar can still be for public discussion about consent and sex. Like Angel, Lorna Bracewell, author of Why We Lost the Sex Wars: Sexual freedom in the #MeToo era, is an academic committed to bringing a feminist perspective to contemporary sexual politics, including via the entry point of #MeToo. She also references Foucault, in Bracewell’s case in a methodological sense as well as a political one: her aim is to provide what Foucault calls a ‘critical ontology of ourselves’, or a history of the present. However, while the two books make for fine companion pieces, they demonstrate different routes by which feminist academics communicate their work. Angel’s is a slim, potent, elegantly argued polemic aimed at a wide audience, while Bracewell’s book is a thorough, scholarly account of the socalled feminist sex wars, published by an academic press, which includes chapters previously published in journal article format. It is to be hoped that her book – or at least, her arguments – find some traction beyond those parameters, for Bracewell makes several important challenges to what she calls the ‘catfight narrative’ of the sex wars, all of which have wider significance. Bracewell defines the sex wars as a ‘series of conflicts over matters pertaining to sex and sexuality that embroiled the feminist movement primarily in the United States, but also, to a lesser extent, Australia, Canada, and England, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s’. (Interestingly, it is from this point that Angel traces ‘confidence feminism’, a mash-up of third-wave and post-feminist sensibilities.) Major fault-lines were pornography and commercial sex, but also sadomasochism and butch/femme roles. The origins of these conflicts are typically dated to a 1982 feminist conference on sexuality at Barnard College, convened by Carol Vance and attended by eight hundred or so scholars, activists, artists, and students, including Judith Butler, a graduate student at the time, and anthropologist and sex radical Gayle Rubin, who presented the first iteration of what would become the incredibly influential essay ‘Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality’. Outside, feminists from the then-ascendent anti-por-

nography movement picketed, wearing T-shirts that read ‘For a Feminist Sexuality’ on one side and ‘Against S&M’ on the other. Bracewell vividly narrates these internecine conflicts. Even more crucially, she expands and complicates them, drawing attention to what the ‘catfight narrative’ has hitherto obscured, beginning with the chronology. She is not the first to do this – many participants rejected the terms of a ‘sex war’ – but Bracewell does offer fresh analysis. She highlights, for example, how lesbian feminism seeded both anti-porn activism and sex radicalism, and how both ‘sides’, to begin with at least, challenged key tenets of US liberalism, including the public/private distinction. The ‘we’ in the title refers to how all feminists involved in the sex wars ‘lost’ as liberalism gradually infected or co-opted both the anti-pornography movement and feminist sex radicalism, culminating in what Bracewell convincingly argues in the final chapter is the carceral feminism evident in SlutWalk and #MeToo. This ‘alternative genealogy’ upends the hitherto dominant explanation that carceral feminism ‘is primarily a product of the confluence of feminist and conservative energies’. Bracewell, a political scientist, brings serious rigour to her ‘counternarrative’ of the eventual ‘convergence of antipornography feminism, sex-radical feminism, and liberalism’, though curiously the wider political context sometimes slips from view. Of even greater interest and import, however, is how she brings Black and Third World feminists to the fore, not just as critics of the sex wars but as participants and theorists. Again, Bracewell is hardly the first to do this – a recent standout example is the work of leading Black feminist scholar Jennifer C. Nash, who is not cited – but she does it well, elucidating both intersectional anti-porn feminism and intersectional sex-radicalism, and by extension revealing blind spots in the theorising of key figures such as Andrea Dworkin, Patrick Califia, and Rubin when it came to race. Bracewell’s wide-ranging account of the diverse sexual politics of feminists of colour recuperates a third way, encapsulated in the experiences and critiques of queer Third World feminists Mirtha Quintanales and Cherríe Moraga. Both attended the conference where they each ‘resisted the compulsion to choose sides in a sex war oriented around the experiences of white women’. As should be obvious by now, Lorna Bracewell identifies significant and enduring problems with the sex wars and their legacies, including the ‘catfight narrative’, which has filtered down into popular consciousness as two designated feminist camps: pro-sex on one side, and anti-sex or sex negative on the other. Along with Katherine Angel, she is well aware of the limitations of this binary for contemporary feminist sexual politics, including how it marginalises or doesn’t speak to the experiences of Black women and women of colour. Ultimately, however, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again and Why We Lost the Sex Wars are optimistic books that bring feminist analysis to the centre of contemporary sexual politics in generative ways. Together, they have much to offer any reader – regardless of their sexuality or gender – who has found themselves uneasy about the valorisation of consent, the categories ‘pro-’ or ‘anti-sex’, or the endless cycle of sex research that creates as many sexual problems as it purports to resolve. g Zora Simic is a Senior Lecturer in History and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New South Wales. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Environment

Frankenfish

highly valuable public licences, be they poker machines or public waters – is still not being achieved in a state that is the poorest, sickest, and most disadvantaged in the nation. Richard Flanagan’s exposé of the salmon industry Of course, Tasmania has changed considerably, but as Toxic James Boyce vividly and viscerally depicts, the stench of failed governance, despite the PR façade, has not been lessened by the popularity of its food and wine, the creativity of its people, or the quirkiness of MONA. Flanagan sets out the reality of the Tasmanian salmon inToxic: The rotting underbelly of the dustry, which sells its product as the epitome of clean and green. Tasmanian salmon industry After a modest start in the 1980s, in the past fifteen years it has by Richard Flanagan become a huge and virtually unregulated heavy industry that has transformed south-eastern waterways. Penguin Random House It is testament to the reverence with which Tasmanians $24.99 pb, 224 pp regard the island’s most celebrated author that so many people efore reading Richard Flanagan’s new book, Toxic: The with knowledge of what has gone on behind closed doors and rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, it is inside the underwater feed lots have been prepared to go on the useful to remember that Australia’s southern isle was once public record. Toxic connects jaw-dropping expert testimony the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. During the first fifty with revelations uncovered by a few dedicated journalists and a years of the colony’s existence, a small ruling élite achieved a ground-breaking Legislative Council inquiry, with little-known near monopoly over the island’s most lucrative natural resources, scholarly papers and international reports, to provide a devasthe subservience of the majority convict population, and consid- tating critique of not just a rogue industry but the system that erable profit from the public licences and patronage associated facilitates it. with political power. Far from these privileges ending with the People with a long-standing connection to the D’Entrecessation of transportation, self-government allowed the estab- casteaux Channel and Huon Estuary already knew the cost of lishment to so entrench their interests that no substantial sepa- salmon shit. The ecological loss in the past decade is obvious to all ration existed between the promotion of them and the functions who fish, sail, snorkel, or just walk the increasingly slime-covered of the state. The enduring cost of a historically corrupted polity rocks of these formerly pristine waterways. But Toxic ’s revelations was well highlighted (including by Flanagan) during the envi- concerning faecal volume and impact go far beyond everyday ronmental conflicts of recent decades, but despite the saving of observations. The industry’s current expansion into Storm Bay the Franklin River and the demise of forestry giant Gunns, a will, when fully realised, result in pollution equivalent to the fully functioning democracy seems as distant as ever. Even the sewerage outflow of a city of three million people. The catamost basic task of government – returning a public profit from strophic impacts of this giant sewer – from jelly fish explosions to the potential release of highly toxic heavy metals currently confined to sediment in the Derwent River – have never been disclosed in the public domain. In other jurisdictions, the expert testimony provided to Flanagan on the harm done to Hobart’s drinking water by salmon hatcheries alone could be expected to provoke a level of official concern. But as final proof of the book’s central thesis, despite its publication coinciding with an election campaign (a coincidence sparked by the premier’s calling the poll a year early), neither the Liberal Party nor the ALP has thought it necSalmon pens in Macquarie Harbour on the west coast of Tasmania, 2016 (Christopher Bellette/Alamy) essary to comment.

18 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

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AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

In chapter after confronting chapter, Flanagan takes the reader deep into the dark reality of this ‘health’ food. There is much information about what the forlorn fish (and, by extension, the human consumer) eat, including the global supply chains that threaten Chilean fisheries and Amazonian forests, while the use of dangerous chemicals for transporting feed and turning dead-grey flesh a marketable red poses further dangers to estuary ecosystems and human health. The close link to industrialscale battery chicken production (chicken body parts comprise much of the salmon’s diet) is both stomach-turning and sadly apposite. Central to Toxic is also a chilling account of the hidden life of the caged fish themselves, a suffering exaggerated by the fact that, unlike Norwegian fjords, where the industry was developed, Tasmanian waters are too warm for Atlantic salmon to survive in without further gross intervention in their lives.

Central to Toxic is also a chilling account of the hidden life of the caged fish Deprived not just of freedoms seen as the foundation of ethical farming – freedom from discomfort; pain, injury, or disease; fear and distress; and the freedom to express normal behaviour – these extraordinary animals, whose wild cousins conduct miraculous long-distance migrations across oceans and up rivers, are kept alive through an intervention innocuously known as ‘bathing’. Toxic teaches us that this involves regularly vacuuming fish from their nets into bladders of fresh water to kill amoeba before being vacuumed back into pens. Amounting to around twenty per cent of production costs as the waters of eastern Tasmania are warming faster than almost any on Earth, giant factory ships undertake this bathing, further industrialising the waterways and ensuring the carbon footprint of the industry is almost ten times that in Norway. Even with regular dousing, around ten per cent of animals commonly die in their cages. Others suffer severe deformities. A sizeable group of salmon, almost uniquely in the world, have their chromosomes deliberately altered to further speed up their growth, meaning that about one-third of ‘triploids’, or what Flanagan terms ‘frankenfish’, find difficulty in even moving. This is battery farming on steroids. Vast quantities of antibiotics are entering the food chain to the detriment of all life. The extent of regulatory failure documented in Toxic is staggering. Even after the infamous saga of the industry’s expansion into the World Heritage Area of Macquarie Harbour, which resulted in the Environmental Protection Authority being taken to court by one salmon company in a desperate attempt to get the EPA to reduce over-stocking by another, there were no consequences for Tassal, despite this ASX-listed corporation having damaged precious wilderness and possibly condemned the Maugean Skate to extinction. When truth is spoken in a small community, it is never without cost. The courage of those who have gone on the record (not forgetting the author himself ) ensures that, despite the tragedy it documents, Toxic is not a depressing book to read. Flanagan dedicates his book to ‘all the brave women’ who helped him write it, 20 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

and they are a remarkable collective. We hear frightening testimony from two scientists, Louise Cherrie and Barbara Nowak, who were formerly members of the Marine Farming Planning Review Panel but resigned after they discovered there was no interest in basic modelling to assess the ecological and health dangers of the industry’s expansion. Then there is the founder and twenty-year CEO of the celebrated Derwent Estuary Program, Christine Coughanowr, who, after successfully coordinating multiple stakeholders to slowly restore a river’s health, has seen decades of work undone by a rogue industry with carte blanche. A newly elected independent member of the Upper House, Meg Webb, clearly not yet understanding how Tasmanian politics is done, established the landmark parliamentary inquiry that is still underway. Then there are the ordinary community members, like the brave resident who maintains her fight despite industry boats being regularly revved outside her home, and the young woman who spoke up at a public meeting only to find wallaby carcasses with cut throats in her garden. The documenting of such courage shows the scale of the challenge, but it does convey hope that change can be achieved when consumers demand it. Toxic also reminds us that, despite industry pretensions, coastal estuaries remain common. No corporation owns these waterways; we all still share in their custodianship. A paradox of Van Diemen’s Land history is that it never proved possible for the ruling élite to fully enclose the island. Soon after the invasion commenced, convicts wandered out of Hobart to live independently in the bush, and this practice of finding freedom in a bountiful natural environment created by millennia of Aboriginal management has carried on ever since. For decades, politicians and their patrons crudely exploited this heritage by presenting environmentalists as outsiders wanting to lock ordinary Tasmanians out of their inheritance. But Flanagan’s exposé of the salmon industry could mark the end of this already fraying political weapon. Toxic’s damning critique confirms that it is not those seeking to protect nature who exclude people from nature’s bounty, but those who would destroy its very existence. In its beginning and at its end, Toxic is a meditation on home. From his Bruny Island shack, source of family joy and wondrous words, Flanagan has personally witnessed the loss of species after species since the feedlots arrived. As with his recent novel, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020), he challenges us to open our eyes and face the truth of diminishment – not just of the natural world but of ourselves. More than twenty years ago, Richard Flanagan saw an octopus crawl from Bruny’s sea, bearing witness to a magical kingdom beneath. The writer has passed on to his readers this gift of a glimpse into an extraordinary world, a homeland now being plundered and destroyed as we get on with our everyday lives. In an age characterised by spin or silence in political discourse, there remains a mysterious power in truth telling. After the publication of Toxic, I doubt Tasmania will ever be the same again. g James Boyce is a Hobart-based writer and historian. His books include Van Diemen’s Land (2008) and Losing Streak: How Tasmania was gamed by the gambling industry (2017). ❖

Feminism

‘Ain’t I a woman?’

by a Black Woman of the South (1892): ‘Is not woman’s cause broader, and deeper, and grander, than a bluestocking debate or an aristocratic pink tea?’ From Sojourner Truth to Pussy Riot Still, the trajectory these selections trace amply demonstrates Megan Clement how the keystone texts of each ‘wave’ pushed the discussion of women’s rights into a new era (though it’s more than a little galling to wonder how many more might need to hit the shore before we reach something like equality). The sophistication of Simone de Beauvoir’s observation in The Second Sex (1949) that The Penguin Book of ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’ is never more Feminist Writing evident than when it follows 200 pages of feminists asking in edited by Hannah Dawson various ways for education and the vote so that women could stop being quite so disappointing and frivolous. Penguin Classics When Susan Sontag notes in her 1959 diary, ‘the coming $55 hb, 704 pp of the orgasm has changed my life’, we are greeted with the here is home for a feminist? ‘I carry “home” on my first indication in more than 500 years of feminist thinking back,’ wrote poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in that women might actually enjoy sex. In 1977, The Combahee Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a protective re- River Collective Statement propels us forward once more with its sponse to the many layers of discrimination she experienced as rigorous definition of intersectionality: ‘We believe that sexual a queer Chicana woman. ‘Home’, for Palestinian poet Fadwa politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives Tuqan, writing in the 1970s, was a place of confinement, where as are the politics of class and race.’ And the excerpt from Magwomen’s movements ‘strongly resembled those of domestic gie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), in which she lovingly details poultry’. The home has rarely been a safe place for women (never the simultaneous bodily transitions that take place as part of mind feminists), who have for milher pregnancy and her partner’s genlennia dared to ask for better accomder-affirming surgery – ‘two human modation. But in the Penguin Book of animals undergoing transformations Feminist Writing, academic Hannah beside each other, bearing each other Dawson, who teaches the history of loose witness’ – shows that feminism political thought at King’s College and gender are tents as big as we need London, has built a vast home for them to be. six centuries’ worth of feminist writBut there is a flaw undermining ers – the ‘city of ladies’ that medieit all. We aren’t told who any of these val author Christine de Pizan enviwriters are, save for their names and sions in the anthology’s first extract. the places and years of their birth and It is a glorious history of women’s death, nor what else they wrote outside struggle for liberation from 1405 to the paragraphs selected for inclusion. 2020, featuring rebellious feminists ‘It is usual in anthologies to provide of all stripes, from the French revolubiographies of the authors, but in the tionary Olympe de Gouges to Kenyan end I decided not to do this,’ Dawson Nobel Prize-winning environmentalwrites. ‘I want to cut them free of the ist Wangari Maathai to the Russian peculiar rope that ties a woman’s words punk rockers Pussy Riot. to her circumstances.’ The effect of In her introduction, Dawson this decision is not to liberate these writes that ‘the story of the four waves writers from the yoke of biographical of feminism is deeply flawed’. Her interpretation but rather to bamboozle judicious editing shows, for example, the reader, sending them straight to that Black women by no means waited Google to find out what, say, Trama for the third and fourth waves to point di Terre is (a migrant women’s orout the blind spots of white feminism. ganisation in Bologna), whether the Alongside the white, wealthy women Eleanor Marx in question is related Sojourner Truth, 1864 (Library of Congress Manuscript of the eighteenth and nineteenth to that Marx (yes), or even whether Division, Sojourner Truth Collection centuries who blithely state that the passage they are reading is fiction their gender are ‘slaves’, there is the or non-fiction. It may be true that, as testimony of formerly enslaved women who ask, as Sojourner Dawson claims, ‘a woman writing struggles not to be reduced to Truth famously did in 1851, ‘Ain’t I a woman?’, or to acerbically her life’, but it is also true, to quote Sara Ahmed, whose Living dismantle the hypocrisies of the nascent white Southern women’s a Feminist Life (2017) is excerpted here, that ‘citation is feminist movement, as Anna Julia Cooper does in A Voice from the South memory’. Stripping these works of their context, as Dawson

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

does, demurring even from providing an index, feels like feminist amnesia. When presented with a nearly 700-page anthology of feminist writing that spans centuries, it is perhaps churlish to ask for more. But though this tome is heavy on writers making the observation that sexism exists, and should not continue to do so, it is often light on specifics. We learn little, for example, about the mechanics of street harassment, revenge porn, stalking, coercive control, economic abuse: just some of the individual beams that lock together to constitute that vast scaffolding of violent misogyny that holds up our society. I would have traded the single paragraph from Jane Eyre we are offered early on for an in-depth treatment of any one of them. There is not much on equal pay outside the abstract. Abortion is mentioned mostly in passing, despite the fight for reproductive rights being far from over. There is little substantial on sex work or pornography – two of the most prominent issues that continue to divide feminists. #MeToo, surely the most significant public reckoning with feminism of the twenty-first century, does not feature beyond the introduction. Other omissions are to be welcomed. There is no ‘gender critical’ writing in The Penguin Book of Feminist Writing. In her introduction, Dawson rightly says that the tendency among a certain strain of feminist to imply or even explicitly state that trans women are not women is ‘a breach of sisterhood and a failure of feminist thinking’. Just as I might have started this review with the story of the man who approached me outside a shop and whose pick-up line was to ask me what I was reading (he seemed crestfallen to find

R EA D G LO BA L

A wise, witty and wine-filled adventure set on the ancient walking paths from France to Rome, Two Steps Onward is about helping the people you love, figuring out what you really want in life and seizing your chance—before it’s too late.

out that it was a feminist anthology), Dawson opens her introductory essay with the tale of a masked man on a motorbike who confronts her on a dark street – each intrusion, in its way, ‘one more jolt in everyday gendered reality’. But there is more to my gendered reality, at least, than intrusive or even abusive men. At its best, feminism is greater than Dawson’s definition: ‘the insight that sexism exists, and the struggle against that oppression’. Feminism is world-building. It is the business of imagining, and then pursuing, utopia. This is what makes Marxists like Shulamith Firestone and Alexandra Kollontai so good at it. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 vision of Ladyland – a place where gender roles are reversed, refugees are welcomed, and men’s attempts at armed invasion are repelled using solar and wind power – also sounds quite promising in our present moment. There are necessarily ‘killjoys’ in feminism, as Ahmed sets out, but there is also the normal kind of joy: the joy of liberation, the joy of ‘lifting as we climb’, as Angela Davis reminds us we must. ‘Feminism is for everybody,’ bell hooks wrote in 2000, and there is something for every feminist and would-be feminist in this remarkable chronicle of a diverse movement’s messy, slow, often contradictory but always exhilarating progress towards a better reality – a safer home. g Megan Clement is a journalist and editor specialising in gender, human rights, international development, and social policy. She also writes about Paris, where she has lived since 2015. Her reporting has appeared in the Guardian, Bloomberg, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Al Jazeera among other outlets.

SH O P LO CA L

A sweeping historical saga, perfect for book clubs. Spanning four decades, from 1920 to the late 1950s, The Tulip Tree follows one family’s story across eastern Europe in one of the most tumultuous periods in the continent’s history. ‘Unforgettable.’ Karen Joy Fowler

Renowned Australian philosopher Peter Singer gives new significance to Apuleius’s The Golden Ass—a hilarious, bawdy tale from Ancient Rome and one of the earliest novels.

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22 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

New boo ks fro m Tex t Pu bli shi ng

From the bestselling author of The Trauma Cleaner comes a book about ghosts and gods and flying saucers and certainty in the absence of knowledge. ‘Fascinating.’ Guardian

Politics

‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’ The luck and swagger of Scott Morrison Paul D. Williams

How Good Is Scott Morrison?

by Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen

Hachette $34.99 pb, 329 pp

lash back to that election night in May 2019, when Australians, depending on their party affiliation, were either overjoyed or appalled at the Coalition’s return despite the opinion polls. That evening, Scott Morrison – a man little known to Australians until assuming the prime ministership just nine months before after an ugly leadership coup – summed up Coalition sentiment and his own Christian faith: ‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Morrison said, before asking, rhetorically, ‘How good is Australia?’ Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen pose that same question, literally: how good is the man many believe to be the most image-driven prime minister in Australian history? Just what will be Morrison’s legacy? Their answer, threaded with jaw-dropping ‘insider’ detail across fourteen chapters, is an often harsh, even scathing, account of Morrison as a leader obsessed with style rather than substance, activity rather than achievement. We see evidence of ‘ScoMo’ as a manufactured entity produced from a cynical marketing recipe. Open a packet of ‘faux-masculine’ blokeyness, add a generous helping of ‘daggy dad’, mix in some family references, and top it off with curry cooking, pool playing, and beer drinking. Best served in rolled-up sleeves in regional Queensland. The real Scott Morrison is far from the knockabout ‘ScoMo’ regional and blue-collar Australia came to love in 2019. Yet how does one sell a wealthy marketing executive who practises a religion shared by one per cent of Australians and lives in a wealthy Sydney suburb? It’s not easy. That’s why, the authors argue, Morrison remains ‘Scotty from marketing’, a man who has dedicated his professional and political life to image-making. Critically, that argument does not subtract from Morrison’s admirable ambition and work ethic, which saw him climb the greasy Canberra pole in just eleven years (he was elected to parliament in 2007). Nor does it ignore the political antennae – often on point, too often not – that allow him to seduce a cynical electorate with an ‘ordinary Australian’ persona while wedging a hapless Labor opposition. Book-length accounts of current political events and actors are now the norm. As a genre of long-form journalism, such ‘insider’ accounts are essential so that ‘outsider’ audiences, often lost in the fog of political ‘spin’, can make sense of their politics. But strictly journalistic accounts, without the buttress of theoretical context, suffer short shelf lives. Errington and van Onselen,

authors of a number of books on Australian politics and leaders, have avoided this pitfall by offering up not just a forensic account of Morrison’s operational leadership as prime minister but, importantly, a remarkably accessible study of leadership, together with a useful discussion of an evolving Australian federalism reinvented by the forces of Covid-19. Who would have thought the states could exercise Commonwealth quarantine powers so effectively? The result is a first-rate book, written in breezy prose punctuated with the odd profanity, that unpacks Morrison’s place in Australian politics. The authors’ key theme is that Morrison has scored too few prime ministerial runs when it mattered. Obsessed with the short-term superficialities of politics, Morrison risks becoming another Malcolm Fraser: a Liberal prime minister endowed with a mandate who sat on his hands and achieved little. It’s a difficult proposition to refute: ask anyone what Morrison has achieved in his three years as prime minister and she is likely to mention only winning an unwinnable election and managing the pandemic. To be sure, capping Australia’s Covid infections at below 0.02 per cent of the global total was a remarkable feat, even if state premiers must share the credit. But prime ministers are only as good as their last election, and voters’ appreciation of crisis management evaporates quickly. Look no further than the 2010 federal election: little gratitude was extended to Labor despite Kevin Rudd’s generous stimulus packages – pilloried by the Liberals at the time – which saved Australia from recession during the Global Financial Crisis. As slow vaccination rollouts, long-term unemployment, and record debt and deficits hit home, the fact Australia did not become another United States or India will hardly be enough. That’s why a key strength of this book is the attendant discussion of leadership theory. ‘Leadership matters,’ the authors argue – even in big-ticket policy elections like the GST in 1998 or Labor’s tax reforms in 2019. ‘You vote for me and you get me,’ Morrison crowed during the 2019 campaign. ‘You vote for Bill Shorten and you get Bill Shorten.’ Yes, leadership matters very much. If success pivots on leadership, it might be tempting to cut Morrison some slack: the man was new to the job when the 2019 bushfires erupted, and those flames were barely extinguished by the time Covid reached Australia. But Errington and van Onselen argue that Morrison must assume at least some responsibility for the public-relations quagmire in which he so often finds himself. One failing is obvious: Morrison’s transactional style, PR-dependent even by modern standards, is insufficient for great leadership. Of course, all political leaders engage in the politics of transaction – pandering for votes, negotiating with stakeholders, trading party preferences – but Morrison to date has given no hint of the transformational leadership characteristic of impressive leaders. There has been no inkling of a long-term vision for Australia, only short-term budget sweeteners to court enough voters to win the next election. Even the establishment of the National Cabinet – the one genuinely meaningful federalist reform likely to outlive the Morrison government – was ultimately transactional. Locked into the cabinet convention of confidentiality and public unity, state premiers are honour-bound not to undermine the prime minister. It’s clever politics but hardly nation-building. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Critically, the authors remind us that Morrison’s transactional politics mirror his own chameleon-like persona. When he first ran for Liberal pre-selection for the Sydney seat of Cook in 2007, Morrison emerged as the compromise candidate wedged between two factions. It would be a tactic repeated during the Liberals’ 2018 leadership spill, when Morrison was seen as a compromise between Peter Dutton on the hard right and Julie Bishop on the left. Entering the House of Representatives in 2007 under moderates Brendan Nelson and, later, Malcolm Turnbull, Morrison was ostensibly a moderate. Promoted by Prime Minister Tony Abbott to Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Morrison became an abashed conservative. Ultimately, the authors contend, Morrison is a pragmatist like his ideological godfather, John Howard. Morrison, like Howard, won’t die in an electoral ditch on principle. If an interventionist economic approach – JobKeeper payments, a Keynesian budget – is what separates victory from defeat, so be it. Perhaps that’s why neoliberals have become so thin on the ground inside the Coalition. Even here, Errington and van Onselen demonstrate that Morrison is a better Liberal Party tactician (he was a director of the New South Wales branch) than traditional retail politicians like Howard. In short, Morrison had a plan to become prime minister, but not a plan once there. Nowhere was the man’s ill-preparedness for the depth of the job – the emotional intelligence required to be the nation’s leader – writ larger than in his mishandling of his first major test: the 2019–20 bushfires that claimed thirty-three lives and destroyed twenty-four million hectares. Holidaying in Hawaii, Morrison petulantly replied to calls for his early return with ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate’. His subsequent visit to burnt-out southern New South Wales looked contrived – just another PR stunt – especially when forcibly grabbing reluctant hands to shake. Yet Morrison has learnt from some (though not all) of those mistakes, and he has undoubtedly grown into the job during the pandemic. Those events exposed another, darker side of Morrison: an easy willingness to avoid responsibility and to shift blame to others. Where is the contrition for the $1.2 billion Robodebt fiasco (designed under Morrison as Social Services minister), or the bungled water-buyback scheme? Where is the responsibility for the off-loading of the Ruby Princess, for his attacks on former Australia Post CEO Christine Holgate, for the ‘sports rorts’ saga, for the tolerance shown MPs Craig Kelly and Andrew Laming? Indeed, when cornered, Morrison eschews the mea culpa and instead doubles down. Criticism is just chatter from ‘inside the Canberra bubble’, he says. The fact that Morrison buys into that sort of cheap populism also blots his legacy, as does his relationship with Donald Trump and his failure to condemn the outgoing president for the January riots. It’s this surliness, the authors argue, that sees Morrison go after perceived enemies. Consequently, funding cuts to the ABC, to the Australian National Audit Office, and to universities simply look petulant. Moreover, when Covid first appeared, Morrison reassured us we’re all in this together. Before long, Victoria was castigated for its second wave, with Queensland and Western Australia – all Labor states – condemned for border closures. The New South Wales response, however, was described as ‘gold standard’. Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen conclude that 24 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

Morrison is still likely to win the next election. But had their book been scheduled for a couple of months later, enabling them to consider Brittany Higgins’s allegations, the Christian Porter saga, Holgate’s very public accusations, the behaviour of Craig Kelly and Andrew Laming, and, of course, what appears to be a bungled Covid vaccination process, their conclusion might have been very different. g Paul D. Williams is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, Griffith University. Biography

The promise of the Bauhaus A major biography of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack Seumas Spark

Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack: More than a Bauhaus artist

by Resi Schwarzbauer with Chris Bell

HistorySmiths $60 hb, 365 pp

ith his founding of the Bauhaus in 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius proposed a radical reimagining of the arts and crafts. His manifesto outlined the principles for an institution that would unify architecture, art, and design, creating ‘a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists!’ At the heart of this stirring vision was a world in which creativity was directed to practical ends, where function was a fundamental element of creative endeavour. Gropius’s call was both inspiring and timely, and it found ready devotees. In a continent savaged by four years of war, there was urgent need for a new way. Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer were a few of the many who made their way to the German city of Weimar to work with Gropius and to help realise his vision. Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, born in Frankfurt in 1893, was attracted by the promise of the Bauhaus as a model for art and life. He was already an artist, and military service in World War I had made him a pacifist. At the Bauhaus he could honour both commitments and join Gropius’s project to show society a path to harmony through art. As Resi Schwarzbauer shows powerfully in this rich book, Hirschfeld-Mack’s belief in Bauhaus principles henceforth remained steadfast. In 1919, he and his wife Elenor, along with Marga, their firstborn, moved to Weimar. He started as a student, learning under Klee. Later he graduated to a teaching position, guiding others in the use and theory of colour. His work with colour is among his most enduring legacies as an artist. This is a biography of a Bauhäusler who in 1940 happened to

be deported to Australia on the Dunera, rather than of a ‘Dunera aiming for economy of material and form and, ultimately, the boy’ who happened to be a Bauhaus artist. It’s a key distinction, reform of society through art’. If Hirschfeld-Mack didn’t sucand a welcome one. The sculptor Erwin Fabian (1915–2020) ceed in reforming society, his other aims were realised gloriously, disliked being described as a Dunera artist, believing that the label and his students loved him for it. Soon Hirschfeld-Mack was prescribed the ways in which his life and art might be understood. taking the Bauhaus to students across Victoria, thanks in part to the patronage of the art historian The description would be similarly Joseph Burke, professor at Melinappropriate for Hirschfeld-Mack, bourne University, who recognised and Schwarzbauer avoids the trap. Ludwig’s talents and what could be Hirschfeld-Mack’s wartime arrest in made of them. Britain – made on the basis of his GerWhile Hirschfeld-Mack’s profesman nationality – and his subsequent sional life flourished, there remained internment in Australia changed the pain of his continued separation his life, but I doubt that his Dunera from family in Europe. Schwarzbauer experience was the defining event it writes tenderly of the love and dewas for some of his fellow internees. votion with which Ello cared for He knew the world already, having her bedridden mother in her father’s endured the trenches of World War absence. But why did HirschfeldI and much other intolerable sadness, Mack leave this duty to Ello? By including the death of his brother 1953, when Elenor died, postwar at Verdun in 1916 and the suicide West Germany was sufficiently of his daughter in 1938. He had felt stable that he could have returned the pain of separation, having lived permanently. While the book shows apart from Elenor since 1936 when that he had good reasons not to, one he left Germany for Britain, a move possible reason for staying in Ausforced by his Jewish heritage. Elenor, tralia, and potentially the strongest, afflicted by multiple sclerosis, had isn’t discussed overtly. Shortly after stayed behind. Internment confirmed Elenor’s death, Hirschfeld-Mack what Hirschfeld-Mack understood married Olive Russell, whom he of despair and man’s capacity for had known since his internment at barbarism. His best-known work, a Tatura. She was one of many Quakwoodcut print produced during his ers who worked tirelessly on behalf confinement in Australia, depicts a of the Dunera internees, providing solitary figure looking through barbed for their welfare and advocating wire to the stars of the Southern Cross for their release. The book is coy on and a vast night sky: this image, in its Untitled, 1941 by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack whether an intimate relationship various versions, is sometimes known (reproduced courtesy of Chris Bell) with Olive blossomed before Elenor’s as Desolation. death, but there are implicit clues If time in internment allowed Hirschfeld-Mack to reflect on the follies of man in pursuing to suggest it did. While such personal matters are not always war over peace, it also affirmed his belief in the universal role for the biographer, in this case there is reason to include them. of art in fostering unity and purpose. After nearly two years in The book dwells on Hirschfeld-Mack’s Christian faith and his internment, he was freed and given an unexpected chance to bring commitment to leading a moral, honourable life: that lens need the Bauhaus to Australia. In 1942, James Darling, headmaster not have precluded discussion of his foibles, if that’s what they of Geelong Grammar School, arranged for Hirschfeld-Mack’s were. Confirmation that he wasn’t a saint would add to what we release on the basis that he was needed for work of national im- know of his burdens and triumphs. The centenary of the Bauhaus in 2019 prompted fresh portance: he would replace the school’s art teacher, who was on war service. Geelong Grammar gave Hirschfeld-Mack a happy interest in those men and women whom Gropius inspired to remake artistic practice. This important and profusely illustrated and rewarding home for the next fifteen years. Pedagogy was a vital element of his artistic practice: to foster biography, the first major work on Hirschfeld-Mack written in creativity, especially in the young, was almost a moral obligation. English, is a tribute to the enduring power and significance of Schwarzbauer devotes a significant portion of this book to his Bauhaus ideals and to a remarkable soul. Not one to seek acclaim, time at Geelong Grammar. Blessed with a decent salary and Hirschfeld-Mack privileged the importance of art and creativity comfortable living quarters – things he knew not to take for over the conceits of the individual. Nearly sixty years after his granted – Hirschfeld-Mack found time to experiment with meth- death, Schwarzbauer’s fine book gives him his due. g ods of learning and the application of Bauhaus principles. His philosophies, Schwarzbauer writes, ‘concentrated on liberating Seumas Spark is co-author of the two volume Dunera Lives creativity, assisting students in their journey of self-knowledge, (Monash University Publishing, 2018 and 2020). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Comment

The digital cliff

Protecting the National Archives of Australia

by Peter McPhee

any readers will recall reports of the fire in April 2021 that damaged the University of Cape Town’s library, which, among other riches, housed invaluable collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and one of the most extensive African film collections in the world. The extent of the damage is still being assessed. Even worse, the fire that destroyed the National Museum of Brazil in July 2018 consumed twenty million objects, including unique documents, the oldest human remains ever found in Brazil, and audio recordings and documents of extinct indigenous languages. Irreplaceable records may also be lost simply because of an inability or unwillingness to protect fragile items before they deteriorate to the point of loss. This is the situation we currently face in Australia, despite National Archives that are among the finest in the world in terms of completeness and the skills of their staff. Archives all over the world are confronting similar problems of managing rapidly increasing digital records while preserving vast print, oral, and other records in different, often fragile formats. They all need government financial support to do this securely and durably. Ours are no exception. While the name ‘National Archives’ conjures up a vision of a repository of print-based official government records steadily made accessible on January 1 every year, the National Archives also hold a treasure trove of riches pertaining to the lives of all Australians in forms ranging from film and posters to private letters and personal objects. It is a repository of unique and startling diversity, the property of all Australians. The painful challenge is that so many of these priceless items are on acetate film or magnetic tapes that deteriorate beyond rescue or are in digital forms about to become obsolete and fall off what archivists call the ‘digital cliff ’. In the words of Professor Michelle Arrow from Macquarie University, ‘There’s no back-up copy of these documents sitting in another country’s National Archives. They aren’t on Google, or YouTube.’ In April 2019, David Tune, former secretary of the Department of Finance, commenced a ‘functional and efficiency review’ of the National Archives of Australia, in particular of its ‘capacity and capability to … receive, secure, store and preserve government information in the digital age … preserve and digitise at-risk collections; and perform its functions and deliver services to the Australian Government and the Australian people’. Tune’s 100-page report is a model of its type and includes twenty key recommendations. He was careful not to call simply for more funding, even though he pointed out that, like all Commonwealth agencies, the Archives have been pared back to the bone by decades of ‘efficiency dividends’. In 2013, the Archives had about 430 staff; today it has about 300. (There are similar tales one could tell 26 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

about other cultural institutions, from the National Library to the National Film and Sound Archive.) Instead, Tune made fundamental structural proposals about better record-keeping practices for the rapidly increasing digital records of national government and administration. There were also controversial proposals for user-pays income generation. But Tune was particularly bothered by two urgent matters of wider public interest. First, in his words, ‘an issue of immediate importance is the deterioration of many records held in the Archives. Limited capacity in the Archives means that many records (in a variety of forms) will be lost if action is not taken. As such, the National Archives could potentially be in breach of [the Archives Act] due to unauthorised loss of records.’ A specific recommendation was that $67.7 million must be allocated across seven years for urgent preservation. Second, Tune highlighted the Archives’ current inability to respond to requests for records within a reasonable time, a bugbear of many historians. Delays of more than five years before researchers hear the results of their requests for access are now commonplace, as the Archives are excruciatingly cautious about processing new material. There is even a reluctance for thesis supervisors to recommend research topics that might draw on archival records, for fear that it would not be possible for students to complete a thesis in a timely manner. Tune submitted his review to Attorney-General Christian Porter in January 2020. It was not until March 2021, however, that Amanda Stoker, Assistant Minister to the new Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, released the findings of the review. She has undertaken to respond to the review this year. Studying our past and telling our stories is critical to our sense of belonging, to recovering hidden and awkward histories, and to creating our shared future. Our National Archives are a core resource for these stories as well as being an indispensable repository of official records. We cannot afford to compromise on which records are kept or on the quality of their maintenance. The Tune review deserves thorough consideration; its urgent matters require prompt remediation. g

Postscript A specific recommendation of the Tune report was that the Commonwealth Government make an emergency allocation of $67.7 million across seven years to preserve the most at-risk items in the National Archives. The budget allocation announced on 11 May was $700,000, about one per cent of the total recommended. The Archives have now turned to crowd funding and other appeals for donations. See https://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/support-us Peter McPhee is the Chair of the History Council of Victoria.

Comment

The split state

Australia’s binary myth about people seeking asylum

by Hessom Razavi

eople seeking asylum are off trend. As the black and brown people on boats have stopped arriving on Australia’s shores, so has our interest in them waned. In commemoration, a boat-shaped trophy sits in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office, inscribed with the words ‘I Stopped These’. Today, Australians seem preoccupied by the vaccine roll-out and allegations of rape in parliament. With a federal election on the horizon, people seeking asylum and refugees seem passé, a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’. My ten-month-old daughter knows better than this. ‘Object permanence’ is her developmental recognition that people exist, even if she can’t see them. Celebrating the ‘end’ of the boats is analogous to an infantile regression. The passengers have simply been pushed elsewhere; an estimated 14,000 now languish in Indonesian camps, even though many have long been recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). ‘There’s a growing number of suicides in the shelters,’ journalist Nicole Curby1 told me. ‘What leads them there is a sense of desperation and hopelessness.’ Far from solving the problem, Australia has shoved it upstream. ‘Suffer or die there, not here,’ we seem to have said to people seeking asylum. Beyond Indonesia, eighty million people are currently displaced around the world. This number surpasses the displacement caused by World War II. Most have escaped state violence or persecution. In January 2021, I met one such person, whom I shall refer to as X. X is a young Hazara person who hails from Ghazni province in Afghanistan. In 2012, X fled their homeland after the Taliban murdered a friend of theirs. Abductions and shootings of Hazara people were on the rise. ‘A horror movie was unfolding every night,’ X told me. X’s friend was reportedly flayed alive and then impaled with a note to intimidate other Hazaras. The writing was literally on people’s bodies. X fled to India, Malaysia, and Indonesia before boarding a boat for Australia. X didn’t risk this journey to jump an imagined ‘queue’, because there isn’t one. Globally, less than one per cent of refugees are resettled through the UNHCR. This is due to a lack of countries that are willing to take them. Many will live out their whole lives in refugee camps, where their chances of being resettled are not determined by how long they have waited. The so-called ‘queue’ is akin to ‘passing an elephant through the eye of a needle’, to borrow from a pre-biblical Farsi proverb. ‘Australia has failed to

come to terms with what asylum means,’ Paul Power, CEO of the Refugee Council of Australia, told me. ‘We see it in the same light as immigration control.’ Cynically perhaps, we have stopped the boats. It is also true that drownings have been prevented, as both our major parties like to remind us. When we reflect on their abandonment of refugees in Indonesia and their hostility towards those who have arrived on our shores, this prevention of drownings appears less a primary aim and more like a convenient side effect of Operation Sovereign Borders. We have set out to repel people who seek asylum; any grandstanding about their welfare reeks of political opportunism. Still, the horror of deaths at sea must be acknowledged. Paul Toohey, in his Quarterly Essay That Sinking Feeling (2014), described one such tragedy: a mother holding her drowned five-year-old. Today, most former boat arrivals, comprising more than 30,000 people seeking asylum and refugees, are trapped in legal limbo on Australian soil. A small number (roughly 120 in Port Moresby and 90 on Nauru, as of 17 May) remain offshore. Those on the Australian mainland are the members of the so-called ‘Legacy Caseload’, a group that includes families, children, and infants. They are not eligible for permanent visas here, nor for resettlement elsewhere. This paradox renders them conspicuous through their exclusion yet invisible within society. All the while, a human-shaped trophy reading ‘I Helped These People’ is absent from the federal parliament. As a member of a family that fled post-revolutionary Iran in 1983, and as a doctor who has visited the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, I have written elsewhere in ABR about the who are we? of people who seek asylum. The where are we now? of Australia’s responses, with their attendant human and financial costs, are the focus of this article. This is a story about problems, not solutions; the latter will remain shelved for now. Our starting point is the bipartisan support, from Labor and the Coalition, for Australia’s five policy pillars on people who have arrived by boat: mandatory and indefinite detention; offshore processing; temporary protection visas; boat turn-backs; and a ban on settling in Australia. This regime is deformed by paradox, oversimplification, and absurdity. This ‘split state’, as I will dub it, has nonetheless been widely lauded; as President Donald Trump told then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in 2017, ‘You are worse than me.’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

plitting is a psychological mechanism that allows people to tolerate difficult and overwhelming feelings. Often, the mixed aspects of a messy whole, both positive and negative, are replaced with all-or-nothing absolutes. Split thinking is common among infants and adolescents; beyond these ages, it becomes a pathological feature of certain mental illnesses. In Australia, split thinking has conjured two kinds of refugees: those who are ‘real’ and ‘good’, or the ‘fake/queue jumper’ who are ‘bad’. ‘Good’ refugees are those we have chosen to invite. For the past twenty years, we have accepted up to 22,000 of them each year, under a humanitarian program administered by the Department of Home Affairs. Julian Burnside QC thinks this figure could be substantially raised. ‘We could easily cope with 250,000 a year,’ Burnside told me. ‘Make it 100,000, and no one would bat an eyelid.’ Still, Australia since 1977 has ranked only behind the United States and Canada in terms of the number of people accepted. My Auntie Ashraf is one such beneficiary. In Tehran, she was subject to a regime that imprisoned and executed our family members. On this basis, she received protection from Australia in 2013; six years later, she became a citizen (as I did in 1991). ‘When I was younger, I never had the confidence to think that I could change my life,’ Auntie reminisced. These days, she volunteers at a community agency in Fremantle and sells homemade pickles at a farmer’s market. ‘Compared to Iran, my problems here are the size of a pinhead,’ she remarked. Ashraf ’s experiences reflect Australia’s discretionary hospitality. Humanitarian arrivals are greeted with an airport pick-up, on-arrival accommodation, and food supplies. Case managers help with access to housing, Medicare, Centrelink, and education. Crucially, these people receive permanent protection, the key to starting a new life in Australia. In January, I met with Dr Aesen Thambiran, Medical Director of the Humanitarian Entrant Health Service in Western Australia. ‘People who have come through the “queue” are given a good deal – access to health, transport, language and community services,’ Dr Thambiran affirmed. He contrasted this with the hostility reserved for uninvited arrivals, though most of these are also ‘genuine’ refugees. ‘Despite Aussie larrikinism, we really like order. There’s an element of racism and a fear of being overwhelmed.’ Thambiran reflected on his upbringing in South Africa, where his Tamil grandfather was imprisoned for resisting apartheid. Legislated in 1948, apartheid postdated Australia’s White Australia policy; some have suggested that the South African regime emulated the Australian model. ‘In Australia, there’s a sort of Great Unknowing, or Great Forgetting,’ Thambiran suggested. We speculated on the psychic link between Australia’s colonisation and its treatment of asylum seekers – one boat people barring another, on ancient Aboriginal land. As Thambiran observed, ‘Apart from Aboriginal people, most Aussies don’t get human rights, because they haven’t needed to.’

’s boat reached Christmas Island on 31 March 2013. X was detained there for two months, then transferred to Darwin, before relocating to Perth via Sydney. Despite being a ‘genuine’ refugee, X has only received temporary visas. 28 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

In Perth, a five-year ‘Safe Haven Enterprise Visa’ (SHEV) has allowed X to work as a stonemason and to study Project Management at TAFE. X, eloquent and hard-working, presents as a ‘good’ refugee but is tossed into the ‘bad’ basket. X struggles with this dichotomy: ‘At the beginning I was quite active … now I find myself with a sense of pessimism about the future,’ he admitted. When X’s SHEV expires, X can only apply for another temporary visa. X’s story is not unique. As of February 2021, there were 31,189 people like X in Australia; they had sailed here between 13 August 2012 and 1 January 2014. Most were fleeing from persecution in countries such as Iran, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Others, such as the Rohingya from Myanmar, were stateless. Thousands of children were included. All had risked boat journeys on the rough assumption that, as a developed nation, Australia would protect them. (Strictly speaking, they were correct; as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention, Australia is prohibited from punishing people seeking asylum, regardless of their mode of arrival.) This proved disastrously out of step with Australia’s chosen policies. Prime Minister Tony Abbott dubbed these people the ‘Legacy Caseload’, signifying them as an inheritance from the Rudd government, which had banned people who arrived by boat from ever settling in Australia. Instead, they were to be incarcerated on Christmas Island or in mainland facilities, since those on Manus Island and Nauru were at full capacity or simply not operational. The government then released many into our suburbs and permitted them to apply for a three-year Temporary Protection Visa (TPV) or the five-year SHEV. A nominal pathway to a more substantive visa was created, though it was almost unattainable. Scott Morrison, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in the Abbott government, conceded that these visas were not designed to provide durable solutions for most refugees. ‘Good luck to them,’ he stated at a 2014 press conference. To better understand the Legacy Caseload, I spoke to Esther Deng, Client Services Manager at the Centre for Asylum Seekers, Refugees and Detainees (CARAD) in Perth. ‘I realised that the government had created two classes of people,’ Deng said. ‘Australia’s program for humanitarian entrants is among the best in the world. Those who arrived by boat are the most vulnerable and the least resourced. They’re not included in anything, which is frustrating.’ Deng explained that, from 2014 onwards, applications for TPVs and SHEVs have been processed under new measures, which she described as a ‘perversion of natural justice’. Funded legal support and translation services have been withdrawn. Unsupported applicants have been subject to a ‘fast track assessment and removals’ system, so that most people who are denied visas cannot submit new information or re-interview. Instead, a new Immigration Assessment Authority (IAA) provides a limited review. The few that can afford court fees may apply for a judicial review, which serves as a revolving door, sending them back to the IAA. Failing this, an appeal may be made for ministerial intervention. To date, this has been a virtual dead-end. The ‘fast track’ has set new records for slowness. People have waited almost three years to apply, only to wait for another three

and a half years, on average, for a decision to be made on their case. By February 2021, 4,530 people were yet to have their initial claims finalised. To date, this wait has consumed roughly one-tenth of an applicant’s expected lifespan, in what Dr Omid Tofighian and Behrouz Boochani have called the deliberate ‘weaponisation of time’ in Stealing Time: Migration, temporalities and state violence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). The system’s screws have been tightened here and slackened there, coinciding with a drop in successful claims from roughly ninety to seventy per cent. People have thus been rejected, slowly and more often, with fewer procedural safeguards. In May, the Department abruptly announced that, by 30 June, 1,100 people would be interviewed for their refugee claims. While this surge is long overdue, the lack of notice requires applicants to scramble for legal support, or face the risk of deportation. ‘Fast’, then, has become the risky speed at which people must navigate this administrative minefield, before attending the most important interview of their lives. So far, the Department has declined requests to extend the timeline. This bipartisan ‘no advantage’ policy has sought to recreate the conditions (precarity, inefficiency, etc.) of transit countries such as Malaysia or Indonesia. I discussed this with Sarah Dale, Principal Solicitor at the Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS) in Sydney. ‘The lack of a solution to the bigger problems shouldn’t lead us to cruelty,’ she remarked. To level the playing field, Australia has split and dropped its standards for ‘bad’ refugees. The idea of bolstering conditions throughout the Asia Pacific, in partnership with our neighbours – so that people needn’t board boats in the first place – has not been seriously countenanced. X asked me: ‘What person gets on a boat if they have alternatives?’

emporariness confers variable rights and risks. Many, like X, have the right to work and receive Medicare, while others don’t. ‘Anecdotally, twenty-five to thirty per cent don’t have Medicare or work rights,’ Esther Deng told me. Most are disqualified from funded support for TAFE or university. Those who are unemployed may, or may not, be eligible for ‘Status Resolution Support Services’ (SRSS) funding. Even when granted, these payments fall under the poverty line. Housing assistance and schooling for children vary from state to state and are often restricted. In the era of Covid, no temporary visa holder has been eligible for NewStart, JobSeeker, or JobKeeper. Like a game of snakes and ladders played in the dark, this system seems opaque and arbitrary. To help understand it, I spoke with Associate Professor Mary Anne Kenny, a leader in the teaching of migration law at Murdoch University. She confirmed that I was ‘asking some complicated questions’. I pored over a spreadsheet of hers that listed the entitlements of temporary visas. It was cryptic; how were non-English speaking asylum seekers meant to decode this? ‘Constantly shifting policy and law have created a host of different classes of people,’ Kenny noted. This merry-go-round of temporary visas can only be costly. ‘The Department’s budget is squeezed,’ Abul Rizvi, former CFO at the Department of Immigration, told me. ‘Under Dutton and [Secretary of the Department] Mike Pezzullo, there has been an enormous increase in the number of ministerial staff. They’re

saving money by getting people off Manus and Nauru, and out of hotel detention.’ Once refugees are out, the costs are shifted onto the community. Charities, community legal centres, church groups, and individual donors have come under strain to make up the gap. In March, Dr Judyth Watson, retired politician and co-founder of CARAD, told me about an Iranian asylum seeker whom she supports. ‘I no longer ask him if my payments are enough,’ she told me. ‘I know they aren’t.’ In our suburbs, a hidden underclass has emerged. ‘We have created an unprecedented risk of destitution,’ Paul Power told me. Refugees are kept in a state of subsistence, at substantial cost to taxpayers. This paradox, nine years old and well past its useby date, can no longer be exploited, even for conservative votes. Maintaining it, the Coalition has argued, deters others from getting on boats. This split thinking suggests that slow-bleeding one group is the only way to keep another out; alternative blueprints have not been imagined.

ar from being exempt, children in the Legacy Caseload are focal points of policy and deserve special mention here. Most of the babies born in Australia didn’t exist at the time of their parents’ boat journeys. Nevertheless, they have been classified as ‘unlawful maritime arrivals’, ineligible for permanent protection or, in some cases, any protection at all. To discuss them, I met with Katie Robertson, a human rights lawyer and Research Fellow at the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne. In 2014, Robertson undertook a rapid tour of Australia’s detention centres in order to lodge requests for babies and their families to remain in Australia. ‘It was hairy,’ she recalled. ‘I was running against the clock, playing cat and mouse with the government.’ Robertson, herself a mother, met with more than one hundred families over ten days. ‘I saw babies being nursed in concrete cells, with nowhere for kids to play or crawl, no toys or books,’ she recalled. In the end, she lodged requests on behalf of 113 babies and won an exemption for them to stay in Australia with their families and to apply for TPVs. Characteristically, the government reserved a sting in its tail: retroactive legislation was implemented to prevent other babies from being eligible for protection in the future. They would be sent offshore to become ‘nowhere children’, as the Guardian’s Ben Doherty would call them. ‘We won’t know the damage we’ve done to these children for years to come,’ Robertson observed. ‘Many that I know continue to display regressive behaviours, like bedwetting and nightmares, stemming from their time in detention.’ This regime now detains the likes of the so-called ‘Biloela’ family (known by their former home town, not by their actual surname: Murugappan). Along with their two young daughters, these Sri Lankan Tamils have been incarcerated for more than 1,000 days in a one-bedroom cabin on Christmas Island, at a cost of $6 million. Alex Hawke, the current Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, has admitted that he has the discretionary power to grant the Murugappans asylum, should he deem it to be in the public interest. So far, he has declined to do so. In Australian schools, an estimated 4,000 children are now recognised as being refugees or as seeking asylum, all as temporary visa holders. Many of those in Western Australia are known to AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Associate Professor Sarah Cherian, Clinical Lead of the Refugee Health Service at Perth Children’s Hospital. ‘Everyone from a refugee background can access our service – all are welcome,’ she told me. Cherian cited the challenges faced by the children, including interrupted education, latent and lived trauma, and difficulties with social integration. With multidisciplinary support, these setbacks were often overcome. As Cherian put it, ‘Our families are amazing, they’re resilient, they’re positive about their new lives. The impact of temporary status on children is profound,’ she continued. ‘All our families want to contribute, and so many benefits have come from families from diverse backgrounds. Our current processes don’t embrace this richness.’

n Perth, when I asked X about their well-being, they said: ‘I have zero hope in the near future. That keeps me awake for hours at night.’ X has battled with depression and anxiety. ‘I’m actively trying to avoid and manage it, but sometimes it overcomes me … sometimes, I’m basically a mess.’ Since temporary visas do not permit reunions, X has not seen their family in eight years. For some, this is too much. In 2015, a friend of X’s committed suicide on Perth’s railway tracks. ‘He was one of the brightest kids I’ve known … [this situation] kills the spirit of anyone,’ X reflected. ‘You know about separation because of Covid. Just put yourself in the shoes of people living away from their kids for ten years.’ Since the early 2000s, Australian researchers have known about the corrosive effects of temporary visas on the mental health of refugees. Suffice to say that in 2015, Juan Méndez, a UN special rapporteur, found that Australia’s treatment of people seeking asylum violated the UN’s Convention Against Torture. What follows is a selected tour of the evidence, starting with Professor Angela Nickerson, Lecturer in Psychology and Director of the Refugee Trauma and Recovery Program (RTRP) at the University of New South Wales. According to Nickerson, ‘one of the strongest predictors of anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder among refugees has been TPV status’. She then detailed her team’s research. ‘Those on temporary visas have shown significantly greater psychopathology, and thoughts of being better off dead, compared to those with secure visas,’ she told me. ‘Interestingly, temporary visa holders were more socially connected with the Australian community.’ This engagement could be because TPV holders were less likely to have family here. ‘The take home is that these people are contributing – they are resilient.’ These effects on mental health have been found to be as strong, if not stronger, than those of refugees’ past traumas. Australia, it could be argued, has damaged people at least as much as, say, their experiences in wartime Iraq or Sudan. I discussed this phenomenon with Dr Annie Sparrow, Special Advisor to the Director General of the World Health Organization, who has worked in Australia and in international conflict zones. ‘I’ve never worked anywhere so miserable,’ she said, referring to the Woomera detention centre. ‘I’d never seen people sew their lips together. There was no media, so it wasn’t a publicity stunt.’ It’s no wonder that Professor Patrick McGorry, a former Australian of the Year, has described our detention network as ‘factories for producing mental illness’.

30 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

These observations align with my own. While I was on Manus Island, a psychologist told me that ‘asylum seekers arrive here with trauma, and we give them anxiety, depression, and psychosis’. This resonated with my family’s experiences, where past traumas were compounded by a subsequent state of limbo. My Uncle Abdullah, for one, fled Iran after his brother was executed by the regime. Stranded in Turkey with his young family, he developed telogen effluvium, or anxiety-related hair loss. Like a cancer patient, his body shed all its hair; he was sicker in Turkey than in Iran. Today, resettled in Germany, he is bemused by the regrowth of his eyebrows. In Australia, proponents of temporary visas argue that refugees are not mentally ill or that they are exaggerating their problems. I put this to Professor Nickerson. ‘Some refugee studies have measured blood pressure and heart rate variability, which reflect emotional regulation,’ she explained. ‘These were worse in refugees who reported higher distress.’ The physiological measures, then, have validated refugees’ claims. Pursuing this, I spoke with the Deputy Director of the RTRP, Dr Belinda Liddell. In collaboration with the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS), Dr Liddell has conducted brain research on refugees using functional MRI (fMRI) scans. Nearly twenty years ago, fMRIs showed that social exclusion lit up the same parts of the brain that mediated physical pain: rejection literally hurt. Dr Liddell’s team has built on this foundation. ‘What we found is that refugees with [more] past trauma had “dysfunctional fear circuitry”,’ she said. This showed, in essence, a ‘dose-response’ relationship, where those with more past trauma had more neural disruption going forward. ‘Our other finding was that post-migration stress was linked with hypersensitivity to perceived threats,’ Liddell continued. In other words, stressful experiences in a refugee’s new host country, such as visa resolution, compounded their past trauma, particularly in a part of the brain that regulates social relationships. Flipped around, these findings appeared to present an opportunity: supportive policies, like our Humanitarian Program, could enable refugees to socially engage and better contribute. Over time, they more than pay their own way, a proposition that is backed up by economic data, including some commissioned by the Department itself. From as far back as 1975, resettled refugees have started to make a net economic contribution to Australia from between five and twenty years after their arrival. While identifying vulnerabilities, the RTRP’s work also attests to resilience among refugees. When I spoke to him, Behrouz Boochani discussed his durability. ‘When I was in Manus Prison, I was determined to protect my brain,’ he told me. ‘I did this through writing, through film making, and working with people.’ This was affirmed by David Keegan, CEO of HOST International, who has worked on Nauru. ‘Detainees who were coping knew that their situation sucked, but kept their brains active,’ Keegan said, calling this a ‘mindset of reasonable hope’. ‘Their mentality was “I’ll do whatever I can to survive”.’ One such survivor is Elaheh Zivardar, an Iranian refugee formerly detained on Nauru. Zivardar is a thirty-five-year-old architect, visual artist, and writer who fled the city of Ahvaz. ‘Iran is not a place for women with aspirations,’ she told me.

A boat journey from Indonesia landed her in detention for more than six years. ‘My wellness depends on the friends I have around me. In detention, I was always hosting people in my nylon tent!’ Despite the risks, Zivardar worked as a service provider with HOST, and made friends with local Nauruans. In February 2019, she was resettled in Los Angeles as part of the US resettlement deal. For a time, Zivardar was a contact tracer with the Center for Disease Control in LA County. She is now working on a documentary with This Machine Media, a New York-based production team. ‘It’s a forensic architecture project, called “Searching for Aramsayesh Gah”,’ she told me. (In Farsi, this translates to ‘Abode of Serenity’.) ‘We are creating a 3D model of the detention centre on Nauru, and how it was designed to torture people.’ In Aramsayesh Gah, Zivardar proposes a radically different architecture, one that seeks to support those seeking asylum. As models of resilience, the cases of Boochani and Zivardar are extraordinary, and troubling. That it takes brilliance – an award-winning writer, a forensic architect – to survive, testifies to the system’s inherent menace and perniciousness. Meanwhile, a wealth of human talent has been lost to places like New Zealand and the United States.

New From Princeton Distributed by NewSouth Books

“Persuasive [and] entertaining.”

“Smartly and engagingly challenges assumptions.”

—Kirkus Reviews

—Frank Bruni, New York Times

n late 2020, Dutton, before his shift to the Defence Ministry, released detainees from hotel detention, acknowledging that it was ‘cheaper for people to be in the community’. This raises long-standing questions about costs; it also raises the question as to why they are only now influencing decision-making. The answer might be ‘a blank cheque policy, paid by you, the taxpayer’ – something like the following. Published in 2014, a report by the National Commission of Audit found that expenditure on the processing of people seeking asylum had increased from $118 million in 2009–10 to $3 billion in 2013–14, representing a twenty-five-fold increase in five years. This is analogous to my baby daughter becoming an 88 kg five-year-old; frightening, especially if your taxes are spent on feeding her. Under Minister Dutton, ‘many senior staff left, and the Department commissioned less research’, Abul Rizvi told me. The ‘baby’, in other words, became bigger, not necessarily wiser. In part, this growth stemmed from the surge in boat arrivals under the preceding Labor government, making the Department the fastest-growing government body at the time. In 2016, a report by UNICEF and Save the Children estimated a cost of $9.6 billion, from 2013 to 2016, for offshore processing, onshore detention, and boat turn-backs. This was followed up with a 2019 report by the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, GetUp!, and Save the Children, with costings by Equity Economics, quoting a similar figure of $9 billion from 2016 to 2020. Taken together, this totalled $18.6 billion spent on our borderindustrial complex from 2013 to 2020, at an average of $2.66 billion per year. These were conservative estimates, excluding the cost of regular inquiries, High Court challenges, and financial compensation paid to employees and detainees. For context, consider a concrete example from the same era. In 2014, Perth’s new Fiona Stanley Hospital opened, with 783 patient beds, eighteen operating theatres, and a total floor area of 150,000 square metres. The campus resembles a future metropolis,

“A brilliant and supremely readable account.” —Daniel J. Levitin, author of Successful Aging

“It is hard to imagine a better introduction to Hume’s world.” —Alexander McCall Smith, author of The Sunday Philosophy Club

“Brilliantly written, spectacularly clearheaded, and quietly passionate.” —Cass R. Sunstein, author of Averting Catastrophe

“Eeckhout shows how the rise of mega-profitable superstar corporations makes us all poorer.” —David Autor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

with features like an outdoor courtyard for ICU patients and a fleet of service delivery robots. The price tag? $1.76 billion. Since 2012, the Department’s expenditure could have funded ten stateof-the-art hospitals, one for each Australian capital city, with two hospitals to spare and a billion dollars in reserve. Make-believe though it is, this scenario invites re-evaluation of the opportunity cost of $18.6 billion in terms of lost public good.

When I spoke to him, Behrouz Boochani discussed his durability. ‘When I was in Manus Prison, I was determined to protect my brain’ In late 2020, Walkley Award-winning journalist Michael Green reported the data on costs for the Guardian. Combing the government’s budget papers, he had calculated that offshore processing alone had cost more than $12 billion between 2012 and 2020. I asked Green about his analyses. ‘This financial year, we’ve budgeted nearly $1.2 billion for offshore processing, for fewer than 300 people on Nauru and Manus Island,’ he explained. This reflected an increase in the annual cost of offshore detention, from a previous estimate of $573,100 per person to $4 million per person. The cause of this price hike wasn’t clear, but ongoing infrastructural costs and limited tender contracts are probable factors. ‘I asked a detailed set of questions – with references – about the costs and the reasons for them, but Home Affairs didn’t answer,’ Green said. ‘I wasn’t surprised. I’ve found it difficult to get any substantive response to any question I’ve asked.’ Canstruct, a Brisbane company (and Liberal party donor) managing the centre on Nauru, has received $1.4 billion over the past five years, despite no new detainees arriving. ‘High as these costs are, they’re almost certainly underestimates,’ Green noted. These mind-bending figures mirror my own observations on Manus Island and Nauru. A basic grasp of mathematics provides any number of absurd analyses; one is as follows. Absurd Analysis: Australia is more worried about the cost of oranges than it is about the cost of detention. While I was working on Nauru, I was reprimanded by a guard. ‘Only one piece of fruit per meal,’ he scolded me. Due to its limited arable land, Nauru imports much of its food from Australia and New Zealand. Based on advertised cargo fees, it costs about $6.75, less on-costs, to fly in a kilo of oranges from Brisbane. This contributes to a final price tag ($15.20 per kilo of bananas, for example) that makes fresh produce unaffordable for most refugees. It also reveals the penny-rich, pound-poor mindset of the department. While spending thousands of dollars on contractors like me, they appoint guards to ration the oranges. In contrast to offshore detention, the government’s own cost estimates of allowing someone to live in the community on a bridging visa, while their claim is being processed, is $10,221 per year (the figure that underpinned Dutton’s abrupt release of detainees). Even if this number were doubled, and compared to the outdated cost of $573,100 per year, community living would deliver a twentyeight-fold saving over offshore detention. In other words, for every $100 of your taxes spent offshore, $96.40 would have been refunded 32 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

to you, had people been kept in the community. These savings have been rejected for years. Both Coalition and Labor governments have referenced virtuous causes: breaking the people-smuggler trade, etc. More plausibly, the dollars reflect the high cost of split thinking in a complex world. A binary mandate that requires adherence ‘at any cost’ means that rational alternatives are subsumed by black-and-white, vote-winning rhetoric. Ethics and human rights be damned, this is proving unaffordable over time.

ustralia’s five policy pillars on boat arrivals are unique among developed nations. Polls and elections have shown a mixed understanding of them. Australians have variously known, not known, or sort of known. In the end, most voters have accepted them, whether through the perceived lack of choice imposed by bipartisan support or by overt agreement. Despite the damning evidence of their unsustainability, and the lack of any exit strategy, these five pillars have proven unshakeable. Why have Australians swallowed this mess? For a balcony view on this question, I spoke with Dr David Corlett. Between 2011 and 2018, Corlett was the host of SBS’s Go Back To Where You Came From. On the show, he took Australians with a spectrum of political opinions on a refugee’s journey. He recalled the participants who had surprised him. ‘Even those who seemed the most rusted on, could move,’ Corlett told me. ‘The research has shown that Australians are split three ways. Onethird are supportive of asylum seekers, one-third are hostile, and the rest are in the middle, and can go either way.’ In addition to misinformation and xenophobia, Corlett cited political, powerbased motives for these positions. One such motive, which underpins the genesis of the Legacy Caseload, may be traced back to Pauline Hanson and the Liberal party. In 1998, One Nation proposed temporary protection visas as part of their ‘social cohesion’ policy. Philip Ruddock, then immigration minister in the Howard government, condemned the idea as ‘highly unconscionable’, before promptly co-opting it for the Liberals. ABC Radio’s Phillip Adams told me that, on finding out, he had walked into Ruddock’s office to demand, ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ And Ruddock’s reply? ‘I’ve waited twenty years to become minister.’ A xenophobic brainchild was thus adopted for political gain, starting a race to the bottom with Labor. Cruelty became synonymous with national security – and electoral success. As Sarah Dale from RACS told me, ‘Fear is the greatest enabler of power.’ Befuddling as it is, this social history has been widely examined. Historians, including Deakin University’s Professor Klaus Neumann, have cited the primacy of the White Australia policy. On this, Jana Favero, Director of Advocacy and Campaigns at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, told me about her conversations with Malcom Fraser. ‘The problem is, we never had a debate to end White Australia,’ the former prime minister observed. This developmental arrest is of interest to Julie Macken, a doctoral candidate on ‘Torture and the Australian State’ at Western Sydney University. When I spoke to her, Macken posited ‘a backward collapse into a regressive national psyche’ hinged on the unpreparedness to recognise, or fully mourn, the ‘violence at the heart of the colonisation of Australia’.

The historical DNA of our split state may ultimately lie in the Constitution. According to Dr Sangeetha Pillai, constitutional lawyer and Senior Research Associate at the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law, ‘the Constitutional framework stands on the definition of British subjects, and has exceptional powers with regards to aliens and immigration. There are sweeping powers of exclusion, and very little in the way of rights.’ In Australia’s long preoccupation with excluding certain races, Pillai identified a uniquely Australian concern, not seen in other modern constitutions. Thankfully, there have been counter-currents to this recent history. Campaigns such as #KidsoffNauru have mobilised a broad coalition, including civil society groups. In 2019, Craig Foster and #SaveHakeem saved a young soccer player from deportation to Bahrain. ‘I believe in the power of people themselves,’ Foster told me. Last year, Medicare-ineligible asylum seekers in Western Australia were granted access to public hospital treatment, in a vindication for quiet lobbying. Globally, there are causes for both hope and concern: progressive campaigns like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter have activated millions of people, while Australia’s hard-line policies on people seeking asylum are being considered by the UK Home Office.

Our split state is nothing short of a national illness. It appears to now be simultaneously healing, becoming more disjointed, and travelling abroad – like a contagion. g Curby produced and co-hosted The Wait, a podcast on the plight of refugees in Indonesia (https://www.thewaitpodcast.com/). 1

Hessom Razavi – a writer and doctor based in Perth – is the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow. He was born in Iran in 1976 and came to Australia when he was thirteen. He completed his studies as an ophthalmologist in 2015. His earlier Fellowship articles appeared in the May and November 2020 issues of ABR. Acknowledgements I am most grateful for the contributions and support of Dr Megan Neervoort, Dr Liana Joy Christensen, Dr Omid Tofighian, Behrouz Boochani, Peter Rose, and the ABR team. The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship, closely associated with the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the University of Melbourne, is funded by Peter McMullin, a lawyer, philanthropist, and businessman.

What Distance Burns Smoke softens the trees, a swift omen scented before seen. It warps what it brings, from the sun to grief. I stir on the stoop I rent. All around me wasps shimmy, Orange alphabet of knives. I call them father and son Until my tongue blisters. I chew the queen into bits And for a moment, we understand each other Her children and I, the way a believer understands God: As a largeness capable of being Stung. Out of stillness I come to marvel At my survival, the stupendous absurdity of breath. I tremble so violent I vibrate off the ground, a man Dripping between earth and sky with only a mother Left in life – what luck – and men I will never call Baba. Soon I am high enough to see the limits of burning The pall dispersing over waves, the end arriving As always, on the edge of an unfathomable wing – In the long vanishing blue I smile a migrant smile Knowing we look our best as we leave.

Omar Sakr ❖

Omar Sakr has published two poetry collections: These Wild Houses (Cordite, 2017) and The Lost Arabs (UQP, 2019). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Interview

Open Page with Stan Grant

Stan Grant is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and Vice-Chancellor’s chair of AustralianIndigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for his coverage of Indigenous affairs and is the author of On Thomas Keneally, The Australian Dream, Australia Day, The Tears of Strangers, and Talking to My Country.

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? I have always been attracted to places with great bookstores. Obviously Paris, London, New York, but I’ve also found great hidden treasures in cities like Jerusalem, Yangon, and Islamabad.

What’s your idea of hell?

Haha. I am with Sartre – hell is other people! Not that he hates other people or that one should lock oneself away, only that we are trapped in the gaze of other people. It is why I bristle at ideas of identity, as if we can be reduced to a singular or simple idea of who we are or who we should be.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Hope. I have never bought that oft-quoted line that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. That isn’t the world I have reported on or seen. If it bends at all, it bends towards power that exploits hope and defines for itself what the limits of justice might be. I am with the great African American scholar W.E.B. Du Bois, who spoke of a hope not hopeless but unhopeful. We need to work for hope.

What’s your favourite film?

The Godfather Part II: masterful storytelling. Robert De Niro’s performance of the young Vito Corleone, following Marlon Brando’s ageing Vito, is superb. My favourite Australian film is The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978).

And your favourite book?

My favourite changes all the time. Right now I am in awe of Christos Tsiolkas’s Damascus. The power and propulsive energy of that book – with the deep philosophical, theological, and ethical questions – is a rare achievement. I love the poetry of Czesław Miłosz. I love Yeats and am constantly stunned by Turgenev. I have gone through a stage of not being able to read anyone but Yiyun Li, who deals so powerfully with grief and history. But my all-time favourite? Well, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain. I read it when I was in my teens, and it has never left me.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine Jesus Christ, James Baldwin, and Mungo Lady.

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

I dislike the word ‘identity’. To borrow from Kafka, it seems ‘like a cage in search of a bird’. Whatever happened to ‘forgiveness’? We live in such a prosecutorial age, with endless grievances pitting us against one another.

Who is your favourite author?

Baldwin has probably floored me more than any other. He has also been a guiding star. And he is always unpredictable. 34 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

When I was a kid, probably Tom Sawyer. Later, Stephen Dedalus. To ‘go in search of the unconstructed conscience of my race’ – yep, that will do me.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

I love writers who see the world poetically, ones who make us search and reach, and don’t give us an easy ride. And I love simplicity of language.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

I was raised in the Black church on the mission of my childhood. The bible was unavoidable and influential. I got a gift of a book of Greek mythology when I was about ten. It gave me nightmares and opened a world of transcendence.

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

I don’t really judge writers that way. Everything I read influences or inspires or challenges me. I suppose I have admired but struggled with James Baldwin, who seemed to lose some of his power and the great quality of love he brought to his novels when he became a much more overtly political writer. Give me poetry over politics any day.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

I love music and I am really enjoying a podcast called Discover, which pulls apart classic albums. I am also a philosophy nerd: there is a fantastic podcast called Why Theory, with two philosophers just talking and posing questions.

What, if anything, impedes your writing? Too many other demands on my time.

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

I prefer to read long essays about books: the type of thing that appears in the New York Review of Books and, of course, ABR! I like critics who engage with the ideas rather than impose their own.

How do you find working with editors? A breeze! Maybe I am just lucky.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

I love having long discussions and hearing from other people. I like being challenged.

Are artists valued in our society?

No. We value bankers more than artists. That’s part of the reason why we’re in such a mess.

What are you working on now? My first novel! Hush hush.

Category

F I C T I O N AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Fiction

‘So many toxic constructs’ Jeff VanderMeer’s eco-thriller J.R. Burgmann

Hummingbird Salamander by Jeff VanderMeer

4th Estate $29.99 pb, 400 pp

n his monograph The Great Derangement (2016), Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pointedly asks why society, and more specifically literature, has almost entirely ignored climate change: ‘ours was a time when most forms of … literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. This was, Ghosh concludes, because ‘serious prose fiction’ had become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that rely on notions of quotidian probability. The irony of the realist novel, then, is that ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real’. Setting aside Ghosh’s claim that there is a shortage of ‘serious’ (as opposed to ‘genre’) climate fiction – which James Bradley finds ‘incoherent … once you start looking, anxiety about climate change … is everywhere’ – the main conclusion stands. If the narrative arts are indeed crucial mechanisms by which human societies come to understand themselves, ours have generally failed to comprehend the threat posed by anthropogenic climate change, thereby committing an erasure or concealment of the prevailing crisis of our time. The significant exceptions to this observation have mostly lain in so-called genre fiction, or, as Ghosh would have it, ‘generic outhouses’. Enter Jeff VanderMeer’s Hummingbird Salamander, a novel that brings into stark relief the formal complexities of representing climate change in fiction. Set in the near future, in a world that ‘seemed to be dying in flame and famine and flooding and disease’, VanderMeer’s latest novel is a thriller overlain with eco-philosophical and Anthropocene anxieties: thus an eco-thriller. When a nameless barista delivers a message to cybersecurity expert ‘Jane Smith’ – the veracity of her actual name is, like much of the novel, shrouded in mystery – her suburban family life in the Pacific north-west of the United States is set irreversibly on a tumultuous and tragic path. Initially, the message leads to a box containing the taxidermied remains of an extinct hummingbird alongside a cryptic note from someone called Silvina, whom Jane quickly discovers to be Silvina Vilcapampa, a corporate heiress turned eco-terrorist of cultish renown, now believed to be deceased. Following the clues set off in Silvina’s wake, Jane descends into a world of espionage and conspiracy that puts her husband and daughter in great danger. As Jane goes on the run, the narrative becomes increasingly complex, connecting her traumatic past with the present planetary exploits of the Vilcapampa corporation and Silvina’s feverish, prophetic writings on our planetary future: 36 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

If we could … really see the world, how radically we would change it. How different we would become … The -ism that will fix this has not [yet] been written down ... So we are left with flawed ways of thinking … so many toxic constructs … But still we must try.

The interplay of narrative elements is cogent, but as an experiment in hybridity between thriller and climate fiction, Hummingbird Salamander yields mixed results. The most considerable of these is that, while the novel is intricate and surprising, the passing references to the state of the planet often read as bullet-point breakdown rather than planetary breakdown, an eschatological litany extrapolated from the present: ‘Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine’. All this is merely mise en scène, as are the oblique allusions to pandemic that punctuate the text. But these overarching threats often lack definition and have hardly any discernible effect on narrative proceedings, with the stakes of the planet playing out, as VanderMeer teases, ‘always somewhere else’. And while the commentary is clear – that the innumerable effects of climate change or societal collapse remain psychologically distant until disaster strikes, until the planetary becomes personal – the lack of political articulation results in a certain obscurity: ‘birds still migrated north, and south, despite the changes to climate’ amid the unspecified ‘disintegrating political situation. Uncertain, dangerous times.’ The violent pilgrimage Jane undertakes in search of Silvina and what might remain of her utopian project is thus difficult to comprehend, particularly for a woman of self-proclaimedly centrist politics. Inevitably, novelists are turning to climate change, if not always for their principal subject matter, then as a contextualising backdrop, as in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13). What is curious about Hummingbird Salamander is that, in spite of its imprecise contexts, it remains, contrary to Ghosh’s line of thinking, both genre and ‘serious climate fiction’. VanderMeer achieves this effect through characteristic philosophical dexterity. Though less cerebral than his Southern Reach trilogy (2014) – the first book of which, Annihilation, was adapted into the 2018 Alex Garland film of the same name – Hummingbird Salamander bears the same ecocritical inclinations, paired now with a more explicit consideration of not only climate but also the unspeakable loss in our Anthropocene moment, a period in which ‘the things meant to help us were hurting us and the things meant to hurt us continued to get better at it’. VanderMeer’s philosophical register, articulated through Silvina’s recovered writings and focalised through Jane’s unreliable narration, lends the text a dimension of elegy: Wildfires in five countries meant animals were crawling to the side of roads to beg people speeding by in cars for water. People were … shooting bats out of the sky, scared of pandemics. To care more meant putting a bullet in your brain. So, like many, I learned to care less. Silvina called it ‘the fatal adaptation’.

Given the heartfelt environmentalism manifest in Jeff Vander Meer’s oeuvre, this welcome experimentation with fiction that explicitly engages with anthropogenic climate change seems likely to continue. g J.R. Burgmann is a PhD candidate of Monash University.

Fiction

Brittany beyond postcards Assembling lines in a factory Valentina Gosetti

On the Line: Notes from a factory by Joseph Ponthus, translated by Stephanie Smee

Black Inc. $27.99 pb, 249 pp

ew books immediately suspend time; few need no warmup and almost demand to be read, reread, underlined. Stephanie Smee’s rendition of Joseph Ponthus’s multiaward-winning first solo book, On the Line: Notes from a factory, is one such read. It is the autobiographical story of an intellectual with a career in social work in the suburbs of Paris, who, having moved to Brittany for love, can’t find a job in his field and is forced to sell his labour as a casual worker in the local food-| processing industry. Here we couldn’t be further from postcard Brittany, whose wild nature, hazy skies, mysterious language, and inhabitants inspired a Romantic generation of poets in search of an exotic fix without the hassle of leaving the Hexagon. Sometimes termed an experimental novel, On the Line defies categorisation. The sixty-six free-verse entries without punctuation composing this diary of social demotion surface from a charged blank page. Words are distilled, sentences stripped to the bone. Ponthus’s descent to hell comes with a whole new jarring soundscape: the implacable cadence of twenty-first-century food-processing plants. His writing conveys the liberating pace of one’s fragmented wanderings when fighting against time. ‘The factory is / Above all else / A relationship with time / Time that passes / That doesn’t pass.’ Such human(ising) rhythm pushes against the dehumanising tempo of the machines. And this is what Ponthus endeavours to transcribe faithfully, day or night, after his unpredictable shifts: I write like I think when I’m on my production line Mind wandering alone determined I write like I work On the production line Return New line

From the grinding monotony of shellfish and tofu processing to the gut-wrenching everyday horrors of the abattoir, the unrelenting rhythm of each episode is dictated by working ‘on the line’. The double entendre here is more evident in the original French title, À la ligne, which, as recalled fittingly by translator Stephanie Smee (whose name surely deserves a place on the front rather than back cover) refers to the production line, but also means ‘to start a new line of text’, or ‘to press “return” on a keyboard’. Given its spellbinding beat, it comes as no surprise that experimental rock musicians Michel Cloup, Pascal Bouaziz, and

Julien Rufié leapt at the opportunity to adapt Ponthus’s text into a hypnotic half-sung, half-read litany with Sonic Youth undertones, À la ligne – Chansons d’usine. On the Line is about factory work, but it fits uncomfortably under the label of proletarian literature. Writing for Ponthus is not an intentionally empowering gesture, nor, in itself, an act of condemnation against capitalism. It is first and foremost a need, his way of holding out. The resulting expression of shared humanity and camaraderie arises from this will to resist. Despite it all, On the Line is not a universe without hope. It is witty, full of irony, even vaguely optimistic. It’s a book where true love exists and where art can save lives: ‘We sing at the factory / Goddamn how we sing / We hum in our heads.’ What saves Ponthus are the songs of iconic singer-songwriter Charles Trenet and all the great writers of the French literary tradition – Hugo and Dumas, but above all Apollinaire, Cendrars, Aragon – authors whose work was transformed by the experience of war; their style becoming drier, more condensed, punctuation often disappearing. The factory is Ponthus’s war. On the Line is at home within the French avant-garde and wartime writing, such as René Char’s fragmented journal Feuillets d’Hypnos (1946), to which Ponthus’s original subtitle, Feuillets d’usine, pays homage. In his previous life as a social worker, Ponthus had published a number of articles on life in the Parisian banlieue, the underprivileged suburbs on the outskirts of the capital. Some of the troubled youth he was helping even co-authored with him Nous ... la cité (The Suburbs Are Ours, 2012), an everyday journal of their joint writing journey. Like war for so many before him, Ponthus is forced by the factory to discover his own truth, find his style, become a poet. He learns to ‘remove all fat’ from the text, just like with the cows in the abattoir. While there is, for Ponthus, a before and after the factory, a common thread runs through all his work, both literary and not. It is a form of compassion and solidarity towards the underprivileged, the sans-dents, as former French President François Hollande had infamously called them, ‘the so-called toothless of our society’, to whom On the Line is dedicated. This is evident in his preface to a hot-off-the-press edition of the works by neglected author Henri Calet (1904–56). Ponthus here declares: ‘Like him, I come from the people and have never been anything else: an unemployed, a social worker, a factory worker in food-processing plants. Like him, I think I have never been able to write anything else than myself and the modest lives that surround me.’ No one could have expected that Ponthus would not see this preface nor this English translation in print. Baptiste Cornet, better known by his pen name Joseph Ponthus (1978–2021), died of cancer at forty-two in Lorient, Brittany, in late February, in the same week that saw the disappearance of major poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021) and Philippe Jaccottet (1925–2021). The French newspaper Le Monde devoted a double page to these disparitions, their three photographs side by side. There they were, the faces of the Francophone-philosophical-poetic heritage, the down-to-earth Anglo-poetics of the everyday, and, as I like to think, Ponthus, in his own unique way, tracing a line between the two. g Valentina Gosetti is a poetry translator and an academic at the University of New England. ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Fiction

River of dreams Anita Heiss’s new novel Jane Sullivan

Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray by Anita Heiss

Simon & Schuster $32.99 pb, 382 pp

here are two famous statues in the Gundagai area. One is the Dog on the Tuckerbox. The other is of two heroes, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, who, with other Wiradjuri men, went out in their bark canoes on many exhausting and dangerous forays to rescue an estimated sixty-nine people from the Great Flood of 1852. That statue wasn’t erected until 2017, but the white settlers did show their gratitude soon after the flood. They presented Yarri and Jacky Jacky with bronze medallions, which they wore on their chests with great dignity. Looking on at this ceremony, in Anita Heiss’s fictionalised version of the story, is Yarri’s young daughter Wagadhaany. She is bursting with pride, but at the same time she has deep misgivings. Why didn’t the town give her people blankets and food instead of medals? Why didn’t the white folk follow her people’s advice to build their houses on higher ground? This scene sets the tone for Heiss’s account of Wagadhaany’s life on the cusp of white settlement, torn between the Bradley family, where she works as a servant, and her own family on the banks of the mighty Murrumbidya (Murrumbidgee), a river that brings both life and death to its human neighbours. We meet Wagadhaany as a happy little girl in 1838, watching the new settlers build their houses, at a time when black and white people lived alongside one another in an uneasy truce. By the time she is a woman with children of her own, the balance has shifted to a point where the white man and his laws are in total control of every aspect of Wiradjuri life. Heiss is speaking from both her research and her experience. She is a member of the Wiradjuri Nation of New South Wales, and that background has informed her work as an academic and author of historical fiction, commercial women’s fiction, non-fiction, play adaptations, children’s novels, and blogs. With its strong emotional pull and its accessible female hero, this novel deserves wide appeal. There are moments of high drama and tragedy, not least the Great Flood, which leaves a distraught Wagadhaany clinging to the roof of the Bradley house with brothers James and David, the family’s only survivors. But this is not a tale of the worst of white settlement. Wagadhaany’s people know about massacres and rape and poisoning, but those horrors take place elsewhere. Instead, Heiss gives us a somewhat more nuanced portrait of a range of black–white relationships, always insidious because 38 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

the white side of the equation has the power and dominion. As a servant, Wagadhaany lives what seems a relatively privileged life; but in reality she has no choices. She is in effect a slave. The Bradley brothers force her to move away from her beloved family to a new homestead at Wagga Wagga. Grief has not improved them. James is an irascible drunkard who barely treats Wagadhaany as a human being and refuses to say her name: she is always ‘Wilma’. David, a somewhat underdeveloped character, seems kinder, but he turns out to be rather different. The most interesting relationship is between Wagadhaany and Louisa, James’s new wife, one of the few ‘good’ white people. Louisa, from a Quaker background, is what we today would call a progressive: despite her husband’s scorn, she is passionate about improving the lot of the Wiradjuri people and educating their children, and she rails against the injustice of the white man’s law. Part of her project is to befriend Wagadhaany; another driver is her loneliness. Heiss’s portrayal of this difficult friendship is one of the chief joys of her novel. The women reach out to each other in awkward ways, Wagadhaany always hanging back a little. We feel sympathy for both of them; it’s their mutual burden that they can never be entirely close because of their fundamental inequality. Eager and slightly patronising, Louisa never understands this. Wagadhaany understands it all too well. Away from the cups of tea and scones at the Bradley homestead, Heiss shows us a different world at the Wiradjuri camps along the Murrumbidya, at Gundagai and Wagga Wagga, places teeming with children, grumpy old aunties, affection, and belonging. But here again, Wagadhaany is torn – between the family of her sweetheart Yindyamarra, father of her children, and the family she has been obliged to leave behind. I could quibble about some of the detail in the English dialogue, which sometimes strikes a jarring, twenty-first-century note: would someone like James really say ‘too little, too late’? In other ways, the language is fascinating. Like other Indigenous novelists, Heiss makes frequent use of words in her ancestral tongue, in this case the Wiradjuri language, with a glossary to help unfamiliar readers. It was a bold decision by the publishers to go with a Wiradjuri title (it means ‘River of Dreams’), but I think it will pay off. The names of the characters are also important. Yindyamarra means ‘respect, gentleness, politeness, honour, careful’ – a name he lives up to. Wagadhaany (pronounced Wagadine) means ‘dancer’. Wagadhaany is frequently too weighed down with sorrow and fear to dance. But there is optimism in her step and a quiet, determined dignity in her character, and she is extraordinarily brave. Her friendship with Louisa gives her an occasional chance to speak her truth to the white woman with a freedom that must have been extremely rare at the time. Her deepest passion is reserved for her family, and that yearning fills Heiss’s story with poignancy and heart. Like Louisa, I still have lessons to learn from Wagadhaany and her descendants. Heiss and other Indigenous writers are helping me, and keeping me entertained into the bargain. g Jane Sullivan is a literary journalist and novelist based in Melbourne. Her latest book is Storytime (Ventura Press, 2019).

Fiction

Karuna’s story

Alice Pung’s first adult novel Yen-Rong Wong

One Hundred Days by Alice Pung

Black Inc. $32.99 pb, 256 pp

t’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be raised in a Chinese family, especially when you are surrounded by markers of Western society. There is no such thing as talking back to your parents or refusing to do what they say. As a child, I never went to sleepovers. During my teenage and young adult years, I felt increasingly trapped in my own home. Everything I did was scrutinised; my parents never seemed to take into account my wants or needs. I found myself grasping for any scrap of independence, usually through lying or stealing or a combination of the two. As children, we are continually told that adults do things to protect us, especially when they are things we don’t particularly like. But when does protection morph into something uglier? When does it smother us, as if our agency has been stripped from us? One Hundred Days, Alice Pung’s first adult novel, explores these ideas through the eyes of a sixteen-year-old girl, Karuna, who is narrating her story to her daughter. Karuna is caught between two seemingly irreconcilable worlds, ones that are pushed further apart when her parents separate, and again when Karuna discovers that she is pregnant. Her mother, only referred to as ‘your Grand Mar’, is a claustrophobic force in her life. Her constant lecturing and berating of Karuna feel like forms of psychological control, a dominance that becomes more sinister when she starts locking Karuna into the one-bedroom apartment they share. Throughout the novel, Pung channels the voice of a teenager who is both naïve and full of the maturity one needs when being constantly infantilised by the adults in her life. Pung explores the paradoxical nature of being a teenager, someone who is still legally a child but who is also capable of bearing a child; someone who desperately wants to be independent, but who also believes that Dettol will prevent her from getting pregnant after sex. It is a fraught time for both teenager and parent, regardless of class and cultural background, and Pung melds these facets into a nuanced examination of a mother–daughter relationship in contemporary Australia. There are many similarities between Karuna’s mother and my own. When she tells Karuna, ‘it’s the way we do things’ as a way of ending a request or a conversation, I feel a pang of recognition. Karuna’s mother expects Karuna to follow her every instruction without question, takes and withholds money from her, tells her ‘you have no idea how lucky you are’. In this way, it is easy to paint Karuna’s mother as the villain of this story. She is forceful, uses guilt trips to their fullest potential, and has all the characteristics of a typical ‘tiger mother’. If I had read this when I was Karuna’s age,

I would have been far less empathetic towards Karuna’s mother; but now, in my mid-twenties and with the benefit of hindsight, I feel conflicted. The sixteen-year-old in me wants to be furious and full of indignation; I have known the same powerlessness, the same yearning for the ostensible freedom afforded to my peers, but I have also grown to understand my mother’s actions, even if I don’t agree with them. There is no manual for parenting, much less one for parents who raise children in a culture and society so different from their own. Karuna’s mother has her own secrets too, secrets arising from her broken relationship with her own mother, a nod to the way in which parental influence have impacts on generations down the line. Given my experiences, it is a relief to see aspects of these filial relations treated with such depth, care, and cultural consideration. ‘It is never a problem that your Grand Mar doesn’t care enough for us,’ Karuna tells her daughter. ‘The problem with your Grand Mar is that she cares too much.’ Karuna’s mother does show moments of physical care for her daughter, taking time off work to boil her soups after the baby is born, ‘of her working overtime weeks beforehand, of her going out and buying … the special food that radiates heat.’ But too much of anything, even love, is smothering – and Karuna feels the full force of this throughout the novel. She also comments that ‘your Grand Mar has never once told me she loves me, or that anything I’ve ever accomplished is any good. She has only ever given me instructions or criticism,’ before revealing she can still tell when her mother is proud of her, even if this is never expressed out loud. This description is revealing about what it is like to be a child in an Asian family. There is, however, a shift in their relationship when Karuna’s daughter is born – Karuna becomes more assertive, pushing back on her mother’s insistence that she will be known as Karuna’s daughter’s mother, and Karuna will be known as her sister. But Karuna also realises what it is to be a mother. She tells her daughter, ‘Your Grand Mar may not give a toss about my wants, but she tries to meet all my needs. She provides for me, she cares for me, she does things that she thinks are for my own good. This is what she knows to be love – a verb, not a feeling.’ Karuna’s mother softens, too, and Karuna thinks this may be because ‘she understands that, just as she wants to protect me, I want to protect you’. Their relationship by the end of the novel is not perfect or argument-free by any means, but it has developed and matured into one of mutual understanding and respect. Any teenager (or former teenager) will be able to relate to Karuna’s story, but details like a mention of kaya jam on toast made me feel more seen in a work of fiction than I have ever felt before. Mentions of racism are scattered throughout the novel – none of them particularly heinous, but still indicative of the specific microaggressions regularly endured by Asian women in Australia. One Hundred Days can be an uncomfortable read, a discomfort derived from Pung’s exploration of the complex relationships in Asian Australian families that have, until now, rarely featured in Australian fiction. But Pung’s writing is also infused with humour, warmth, and an understanding of what it is to be both mother and daughter. This is a novel that, at its core, is about the depth of a mother’s love, and the complicated ways in which that love can be manifested. g Yen-Rong Wong is a writer based in Meanjin (Brisbane). ❖ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Fiction

Houses of unreason A triptych of Gothic novels Georgia White

tight and suspenseful are forced to a crawl as JJ mechanically informs us every time anyone opens a door, pulls up a chair, or turns on an appliance. This literal-mindedness makes sense in a child’s narration; less so in that of a whip-smart twenty-fouryear-old. JJ’s sleuthing pays off eventually, but it’s just a pity the pacing does her characterisation such an injustice.

s it tautological to describe a work of fiction as ‘family Gothic’? After all, there’s nothing more inherently Gothic than the family politic: a hierarchical structure ruled by a patriarch, as intolerant of transgression as it is fascinated by it, sustaining itself through a clear us/them divide, all the while proclaiming, ‘The blood is the life.’ Yet three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating, each to the point of melodrama, just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another. In Erina Reddan’s The Serpent’s Skin (Pantera Press, $29.99 pb, 364 pp), it is the father and his godlike authority from whom the fracture emanates. The novel begins in 1968, when ten-year-old Elizabeth Jane ‘JJ’ MacBride is living on her parents’ farm in a rural Catholic community. JJ is a perverse child, we’re told; at times, she is possessed by a destructive impulse she calls ‘the red’, which pushes her to call her mother names, defy her older siblings, and lash out at the Mother Superior at her school. When the novel opens, JJ’s mother has vanished. She has gone to stay with her sister in Melbourne, JJ’s father claims, but her children cannot contact her and he refuses to say when she’ll be back. Days pass with no word of her return, and JJ starts to sense cracks in her father’s story: why, for instance, would her mother leave behind her wedding ring, or the scarf she wears to Mass each Sunday? But the intricacies of marital relations are beyond JJ’s comprehension, and Reddan is to be commended here for how well she captures the scruffy edges of the juvenile consciousness. JJ may smell the ‘spit of guilt’ on her father, but she’s at a loss as to what it might mean, and her upbringing has taught her that his word, however corrupt, is law. We then jump forward fourteen years, when a funeral brings JJ together with her family once more and dredges up some long-suppressed memories of her mother’s disappearance. Sadly, this second half of the novel is weaker than the first: we’re told that the adult JJ has become an academic over-achiever and a rising legal star, but there’s little evidence of this in her narration, where her vocabulary and emotional intelligence seem only marginally more sophisticated than when she was a child. Her rebellious spirit makes a welcome resurgence, as she sets out on a second attempt to expose her family’s skeletons, but the plot suffers from an over-specificity of detail. Scenes that should feel 40 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

hereas Reddan’s novel capitalises on the kinds of horrors that eventuate when patriarchy and religion collide, Kelli Hawkins’s Other People’s Houses (HarperCollins, $32.99 pb, 330 pp) takes us into the uncanny valley that is upper-middle-class suburbia. Her protagonist, Kate Webb, is a woman suffering from the resilience of grief, a condition that can linger long after the wells of sympathy have dried up. Seeking a sense of intimacy that demands nothing of her in return, Kate spends her time wandering through the manicured interiors of houses that are up for auction, suspending herself in the lives of others as she tries to forget her own.

Three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another One house in particular arrests her imagination for reasons that have nothing to do with its pristine façade: the child in the family’s photographs is a doppelgänger for the son she lost ten years prior. When Kate stumbles across signs of dysfunction in the house’s outwardly perfect ménage, her behaviour accelerates from hobbyist prying to outright stalking. As she resolves to protect the child (now a teenager) from a family she believes to be on the point of disintegration, others try to caution her that she is playing with fire. But the alienated and depressed Kate is unreceptive to their warnings, realising, all too late, that the danger is not where she thinks it is. At first, Kate is a delightfully spiteful narrator: to her vindictive eye, a flag on a windless day is ‘flaccid’; a child wearing a puffy coat looks like ‘a colourful little sausage’. Here, she describes a sycophantic realtor sucking up to a wealthy Sydneysider: ‘She made London sound like heaven. Or an orgasm.’ Other People’s Houses may best be classified as a domestic thriller, but there’s a redemption arc here. We learn through a series of flashbacks that Kate has good reason to be mistrustful of others, and the novel proves to be just as much about her learning to live productively with her grief, and to uncover what kind of person she is when freed of her rage and self-loathing. As it turns out, that person is a little bland. It’s true what Tolstoy says about happy families; by the novel’s end, all of the well-adjusted characters seem rather alike. Still, the plotting is sound, the twist is solid, and it’s an excellent premise that speaks to the voyeur in all of us. For what other reason does anyone read fiction if not to peer into other people’s houses?

f in Reddan’s novel the tension crystallises around the father, and in Hawkins’s novel, around the lost child, Kathy George’s Sargasso (HQ Fiction, $29.99 pb, 392 pp) completes our

triptych by focusing on the woman and the house that holds her captive. The title gestures towards George’s literary influences (Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys), but the novel also draws upon – and subverts – elements of the Gothic heteroromantic fantasy as outlined by Joanna Russ in her essay, ‘Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband’ (1973). As Russ explains, part of the draw of the contemporary Gothic romance is the thrill of not knowing whether that brooding, handsome man is the love of one’s life or a homicidal maniac. The novel’s protagonist, Hannah Prendergast, is a woman returning to her childhood home on the Victorian coast after some years away, having recently inherited her father’s house through her grandmother. Her intention, when she arrives, is to prepare ‘Sargasso’ for sale, but the longer she stays there the more she struggles with the idea of leaving. Her relationship with her boyfriend is threatened by the reappearance of an old childhood friend, Flint: a quintessential Byronic hero, Flint exhibits shades of Heathcliff as well as Sylvia Plath’s ‘man in black with a Meinkampf look’. Through flashbacks, we learn more about the untimely death

of Hannah’s father, a brilliant architect who designed Sargasso, but we also encounter more questions than answers about Flint. In the present day, the adult Hannah is falling more and more under his spell – or, perhaps, like any good Gothic heroine, it’s the house that seems to bring him to her that she loves first and foremost. To reinvent a wheel that has already completed many a rotation is not an easy task, and in one sense there’s nothing hugely innovative about Sargasso. As with its predecessors, there’s a skulking presence lurking in its figurative attic, and readers familiar with the genre might well see the twists coming long before the end. But it’s so beautifully written, so skilfully plotted, such a masterpiece of tension and atmosphere, that it hardly matters. There’s a reason so many of us keep coming back to the Gothic, despite knowing all its tropes inside and out: like Hannah, Jane Eyre, and Mrs de Winter before her, we return to these houses of unreason in our dreams. g Georgia White is a PhD student at Monash University. She researches Victorian Gothic and supernatural fictions.

Miracle Play All morning, I read about Christian mystics. After a long bath, I wear a caftan and silver ring. Intolerable hours of waiting for you. I plunge my hands in ice water. The sun is red and low when I meet you by the fountain. Houses on steep hills light up. You speak to me with your deep voice like a man hammering in a forge. I thrill at the sound like a dog. We watch a miracle play performed by homosexuals. The homosexuals play saints or abstractions. One man wears antlers braided with holly. Chastened in the last act, a lascivious friar loses his wig. Longing is simple. However, you are a man with a skeleton, a will, a past. We argue on our way to your place for dinner. My arm around your waist, drawing you near, is a gesture of peace. We eat salt-baked branzino stuffed with chilies. We slowly pour cold water into our liquor until it clouds in the glass. Wind buffets the screen door constantly. I sob in the bathroom. Feathergrass shifts in the moon’s lean light. It is now so late the exact hour does not matter. Passing the blunt, you exhale smoke like a sun god. When we kiss I kiss your skull.

Derrick Austin ❖

Derrick Austin is the author of Tenderness, forthcoming from BOA Editions in September 2021, and Trouble the Water (BOA Editions). He is a 2019–21 Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Story

Bunker by Josephine Rowe

he quiet had left me. That’s how I put it, but I meant Maree. Most of her cosmetics abandoned in a swollenstuck bathroom drawer. Hydrators, anti-aging, complexion correction. Potions, I called them, like an old man describing a woman’s things. A few days after she left I tried them on myself, mostly for the smell of her. Of course they did not correct anything, did not make me beautiful, only streaked me to an unlikely shade – Maree’s – darker and more lustrous than my own. I accepted why she’d gone. She’d made a choice, and it was not the wrong choice – her folks old and susceptible, too proud to see it and too stubborn to budge. Bad reception where they are. Have to climb a hill to make a call. But she never climbs the bloody hill. And her emails, when they come, arrive in business hours. There are people in the world who’ve never thrown a plate at a wall. Think of that. Evenings when the phone rings out and out and I think I’ll never pull in a full breath again I put my feet into Maree’s boots and I take the dog to check on Tilde’s. Though Tilde is gone now, too. Until February she’d been our closest neighbour. Now she’s up at St Elisabeth’s, where nobody but family can get at her, and she has no family that I know of. Three Ks to Tilde’s, and the sky looks poisoned. I let the dog go when we reach the catchment, and she bolts down into the dry basin of the reservoir. Dry six years, and baked hard as a French tennis court, fissured with cracks. The water gauge stranded centre left, impossible numbers scored at intervals, indicating depths that are unthinkable now, already. I stay up at the rim, watching the dog zigzag below, pawing at the ashy hollows of charred eucalypts that have tumbled down since the last fires. In town I’d heard from Thorpe at the Ampol about how Tilde was when they took her to St E’s, how she’d been found parked idling in front of the diesel bowser, reciting something, barely dressed in spite of the frost and running a temperature of 105. Reciting what, I wanted to know. Usual gibberish, he said, not unkindly. But in spite of all that she was quite plausible, really quite plausible … 42 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

I didn’t know what he meant by plausible – genial? compliant? comprehensible? In any case, I felt responsible. I thought – still think – of the two ancient, adjacent neighbours I had, in the year I lived in a colossal city. Each morning one would shuffle along the landing to the door of the other, knocking and calling out: Still alive in there? or Are you dead yet, my friend? Fairly certain Tilde isn’t dead yet. Someone would surely say. Then Maree would have a reason to pick up. The dog runs back up the embankment, weaving between my legs, lovingly jeopardising me. A beautiful dog – red-gold with fennec-like ears, and as always it still feels radiant to be the subject of her attention. We put on speed over the bare red bull ant fields, so the jumpers don’t have time to get purchase, and we keep up that pace until Tilde’s forest comes into view; a grove started from a handful of seeds, tipped out of a secondhand coat pocket fifty years ago, with no notion of what they were. A kind that oughtn’t usually grow here, it turned out. Canoe timber, so far inland. She’d raised them to cover a three-acre plot with all the denseness of a plantation. Now they towered, blotted the sky. Or sheltered you from it, as you like. The world had gone to the knackery, Tilde said, but she was making her own climate here. Actually, what she said was: Fuck em, Grow my own fucking air. Amidst the trees, a clearing, and the train carriage she had for a home. Rooms too small to haunt, you’d think. But of course no place is too small. This used to be the kind of place that people sought out, removed to, in order to prepare. A place others have never left, never had the means to leave. That’s how it goes, world over. Flat-earthers, doomsday prophets, climate migrants. All moved by some tidy compulsion to see out the end of the world from the end of the world. (Alas, the world has many ends.) Tilde had lived a long time here on stewed apples and champagne. What she called champagne, which was neither the real French stuff nor supermarket sparkling, but a kind of home-stilled

ginger vermouth spritzed with Schweppes. By the time Maree and I knew her, Tilde was eighty-one, and most of her verbal communication came in the form of poems she’d learnt by rote as a child – Twenty centuries of stony sleep, and so on – but she could still chop a cord of firewood, care for the trees, keep herself and her carriage-home together. She was never leaving, come hell or (less likely) high water. Some years ago, before all this, she’d buried a horse float for a bunker. There was no easy way down into it, but you could tell its whereabouts. The grass having grown back thicker there to carpet it, plush for these parts. The dog stretches out, prostrates herself in the green pile, panting. That’s where she always goes, now. We’ve come by often since she was taken away. To let in the air, keep the dust stirred up. Free the quoll that had made its own mysterious way in. Browse the spines of her books. There are people who can read centuries of history in the ear wax of whales. Tilde was maybe never one of these people, but she subscribes to those kinds of magazines. Maree had what she called illuminary conversations with Tilde. (I made as though not to care too much if our own conversation was less luminous.) We came to visit her as a pair just the once, and it was obvious Tilde was funny about lesbians. A shame, because she would’ve made such a good one. Maree reckoned maybe that was part of it. Maybe the opportunity just never arrived, or maybe it had, and she’d slept on it, messed it up somehow. Or … But what did we know, about all the years gone before? After that one time, we went separately to look in on her. Two, three times a week, taking turns. She never thanked you for it but she was civil. Sat you down at her table and fixed you up with a mug of something instant. Hold your eye across the plastic gingham tablecloth, the carnival glass bowl filled with pill packets, matchbooks from dead motels, paper straws of sugar, powdered whitener, salt-and-pepper sachets filched from servos and fastfood joints she’d wander in and out of, stuffing her pockets. War effort, she called it. And I didn’t know if she’d meant now, or a habit formed in the wake of some previous war, cultivated over a lifetime. Either way, a diligence you had to admire. Salt to lengthen out the smart … she said, breaking a brittle straw of sugar crystals over her own coffee cup. The last time I was here she watched the window cagily – beyond which the dog, stretched out on the verdant rug of turf – and finally spoke. So she told you about it, I reckon. (She meant Maree.) How do you mean? I asked, though I knew she meant the bunker. Everybody in town knew about the bunker. Everybody knew there was more to it. Though it was true she believed in nigh times and spoke half in Yeats, Tilde was still sharp enough to know that sixty-year-old steel under three feet of earth wasn’t going to withstand much of anything – wasn’t going to dampen an inferno, or slow the creep of radiation by so much as an isotope. She believed otherwise, though. Believed the horse float was as good as consecrated. It had carried the body of a girl-saint from the west coast, half a century ago, and hadn’t been tainted

with anything or anyone else since. (Maree had not, in fact, told me that part.) Three rounds of fires had swept through the region in the years since she’d buried it, and windswept embers from surrounding blazes had singed not a stick, not a leaf, sparing the grove and her home within it. What do you make of that? Tilde, eyeing me that last time, crushing a tablet of some kind between two tarnished spoons. I couldn’t say. Flame retardant, those trees? Blessed! she hissed, stirring the pulverised medication into her coffee. Holy. And where was the saint now? Tilde waved a hand; what did that matter? Maybe they’d finally left the poor kid alone. Stopped bothering her for things. Maybe someone finally had the decency to bury her, let her get a bit of kip. There’s supposedly a hatch to it somewhere, sealed over now with turf and layers of decaying leaf litter. I find this both comforting and terrible. I lay my palms flat upon the plastic gingham tablecloth. Feel them stick. Wanting something to call Holy, call Hallowed, but without all the rest of the bullshit, if you please. Someone from the town will come for it sooner or later. Saint or no. They’ll churn the ground up, see what Tilde’s idea of treasure had been. I’ve thought myself of taking a spade and slicing up the clods until I feel the knock travel up through my forearms, until the muffled knell of hollow metal. And I’ve thought better of it. Again and again. Outside, against the green, the russet streak of the dog (after something). She howls once, a deep animal keening that spills into the furrows of my own and makes us complicit. I learn Tilde’s full name from prescription labels. Eberhart, Mathilde. Take out my phone and look up: eliptripan for heartbreak propranolol for heartbreak I swallow a couple of each, tipping a sugar sachet into my mouth after to draw off the bitterness. In a dream I had recently I could see her just as she was, not draped weightless on an ICU bed but here still, below, hardy and hoary as ever, drawing sustenance from the underworld. Gnawing tubers, tapping roots for their sugared water, light channeled down through filaments of her grove, the hollowed trunks of her trees. That’s not quite true, about it coming in a dream. It’s an image summoned up in broad daylight – lucid, sober – and seeming no more implausible than anything else. I could come right out and ask her, ask Tilde: Are we in the Before or the After? g Josephine Rowe is the author of three story collections and a novel, A Loving, Faithful Animal. For 2021–22 she will be in residence as a Cullman Centre Fellow at the New York Public Library. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Comment

A period in the shade Patrick White thirty years on

by Martin Thomas

‘Y

our sense of permanence is perverted,’ said Holstius to Theodora Goodman in The Aunt’s Story (1948). ‘True permanence is a state of multiplication and division.’ The words are prescient, for Patrick White, who wrote them, has done rather well at dissolving into the impermanence of post-mortem obscurity. Perhaps unsurprisingly in view of the pandemic, the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 2020 left little imprint. No literary festival honoured the occasion, and no journal did a special issue. If White is looking down at us from some gumtree in the sky, he will be bathing in the lack of glory. He despised the hacks of the ‘Oz Lit’ industry as much as he loathed the ‘academic turds from Canberra’. As one of those unmentionables from the Australian capital, perhaps I should hold my tongue. But I can’t help thinking that the absence of Patrick White for a full three decades is something to care about, if only to understand how a writer of his intelligence and standing has become a Great Unread. The situation is hardly new. As far back as 2006, White’s stocks had fallen to the extent that a journalist, writing under the name ‘Wraith Picket’, could type out a chapter from White’s novel The Eye of the Storm (1973) and submit it as an unsolicited manuscript to a dozen agents and publishers in Australia. Despite the anagrammatic hint in the nom de plume, no one recognised the work as White’s and no one considered it worthy of publication. Things have certainly changed since the 1970s when the buzz around the newly minted Nobel laureate was such that the writer Barbara Blackman could protest that a ‘Patrick White Australia Policy’ gripped the nation. White’s searing wit, which had a delicious way of pirouetting into high bitchiness, is one reason why he is still worth reading. His comic brilliance is fully evident in his works for theatre, as it is in his letters, which he later urged recipients to destroy. (Of course they didn’t.) Accessing this aspect of the White oeuvre is easy. While researching White in the 1980s, David Marr unearthed more than enough letters to fill a large volume. Published by Jonathan Cape in 1994, it is a fine companion to Marr’s marvellous biography, Patrick White: A life (1991). Marr is one person for whom the thirtieth anniversary did not slip by unnoticed. He threw a dinner party, bringing together 44 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

veterans from White’s inner circle, a talented crowd of younger friends who used to gather at the house on Martin Road in Sydney’s Centennial Park where White spent the last third of his life. Marr came to know White well during the years he worked on the biography. When I spoke to Marr recently for a Menzies Australia Institute podcast interview, he explained that his own trajectory intersected with White’s at an early age. During Marr’s childhood, his family had friends who were close neighbours of White and Lascaris. At that time the couple lived in a house called ‘Dogwoods’ in the township of Castle Hill, then on the outer edge of Sydney. The young Marr never met them, but he remembers the house on Showground Road (a wonderful address for a man rather fond of glitter and greasepaint). Castle Hill was the inspiration for the imaginary locality of Sarsaparilla, a bedraggled backwater of outer suburbia, studded with unpromising place names like Terminus Road and Barranugli. White populated this topography with gossips and busybodies – bastions of the ordinary – who are counterposed by the motley and often taciturn ensemble of misfits and eccentrics living in their midst. Sarsaparilla is the setting for many of White’s stories, including the book that made him, The Tree of Man (1955). At Castle Hill, White and Lascaris lived quietly, as homosexual couples often did in the 1950s. Lascaris was also a ‘new Australian’, the word ‘immigrant’ requiring a euphemism in those years. The emotional scars of the war, streaked by a strong sense of survivor’s guilt, haunted Lascaris for the remainder of his life. They were personified in the memory of a beautiful German soldier with whom he had an affair in 1934 and who had subsequently begged him for assistance in getting out of Germany. Not realising the horror of the situation there, Lascaris had ignored the request. He never heard from the man again and always regretted his failure to help him. Years later, Lascaris explained to the academic and translator Vrasidas Karalis that he ‘escaped to Patrick and Australia because there was so much death around me, so much darkness. I wanted a place without my memories.’ Whether Australia – or anywhere else for that matter – could have delivered on that front is doubtful. But the new country did give him plenty that he could never

forget. This was the time when Robert Menzies was hunting reds with McCarthyite zeal. The real White Australia policy was in full swing, bringing untold misery to the ‘old Australians’.

hile White and Lascaris were putting down roots at Castle Hill, droves of artists and intellectuals were heading in the opposite direction. The exodus from Australia resulted in the departure of artists as diverse as Michael Blakemore, Carmen Callil, Randolph Stow, Clive James, Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, John Pilger, and Germaine Greer. White fully understood the persuasiveness of these ‘push factors’, but his response to them was very different. The uncertainty of the European foothold in Australia, and the sense of fragility and spiritual vacuity that resulted, became one of his great themes: to ‘people the Australian emptiness’. The ‘push power’ of a seemingly desolate culture in Australia cannot be separated from the ‘pull’ of Europe, which White himself felt strongly throughout his life, despite his growing reputation as the de facto ‘novelist laureate’ of Australia, a status almost formalised by the award of the Nobel Prize in 1973. Ever the iconoclast, White told the press when the Nobel Prize was announced that while his blood was Australian, he felt himself a Londoner ‘at heart’. He was serious when he described himself as a Londoner. White was born there in 1912 while his parents were making an extended visit to the imperial capital, as colonials of their wealth and class were inclined to do. After studying at Cambridge, he moved there, living at various addresses in the Bohemian quarter on and around Ebury Street, close to Belgravia but closer still to the less salubrious Victoria Station. Marr laments that for all the blue plaques in London connecting famous people with buildings, White’s years in the city have not been officially recognised. If ever he gets his plaque, it will be at 13 Eccleston Street, the address where he lived longest. There, more than anywhere else, he ingested the modernist influences that shaped his style. The particular influence of London on White’s artistic formation was the immersion in other art forms it provided him. There was always the theatre (White, in the London years, saw his future as a playwright), but it was music and especially painting that brought rhythm, texture, and tonality to his writing. Painting as a medium suggested models for his own aesthetic, and several of his major texts, including The Aunt’s Story and the play The Ham Funeral (1961), were directly inspired by works he had seen in painters’ studios. The Vivisector (1970) remains White’s consummate statement on painters and painting; its protagonist, Hurtle Duffield, is a composite of various painters he had known over the years (Sidney Nolan is often mentioned, but there were many others). White’s deep engagement with the medium of painting began during his Ebury Street years. Among his neighbours was a wild and extravagant young man, English by descent although raised in Ireland. When White first knew Francis Bacon, he was designing furniture for a living. White became a client as well as a friend, commissioning various items including a desk he adored. Their friendship blossomed and endured, despite the fact that White thought Bacon overdid the lipstick. The two were introduced by the Australian-born artist Roy de Maistre, their senior by about

twenty years. An eccentric whose many affectations included a royal pedigree, de Maistre was, as Marr’s biography points out, far more interesting than his self-mythologisation would suggest. As well as having ‘a knack of making young and talented men take themselves seriously’, he was a formidable painter at his experimental best, although one required by circumstance to produce too many potboilers.

If White is looking down at us from some gumtree in the sky, he will be bathing in the lack of glory White’s move from Ebury Street around the corner to Eccleston Street was due to de Maistre, who was an in-law of White’s godmother and whose patrons included the Tory politician Richard ‘Rab’ Butler. Butler purchased for de Maistre the lease on number 13, which he used as both studio and residence. White, who sublet the two upper floors, fell heavily in love with de Maistre, and for a time they were romantically involved (Bacon, too, was briefly de Maistre’s lover, though there is no evidence to support speculation that White and Bacon were themselves physically intimate). Yet de Maistre’s enduring influence over both young protégés was as a mentor rather than a lover. The radical synthesis of auditory and visual perception in the abstract paintings de Maistre completed in Australia after World War I is also a trait in White’s writing. Tellingly, White said of de Maistre that he ‘taught me how to look at paintings, to listen to music … He taught me to walk in the present.’ Through de Maistre’s friendship and tutelage, White developed the confidence to understand the nature of his talent and where it might take him. De Maistre, who had little enthusiasm for the theatre, disapproved of White’s wasting his time on scripts that no theatre would perform. White came to swallow the bitter truth that his infatuation with the stage was unrequited. His future lay in the novel.

ike William Faulkner, James Joyce, and so many of the major moderns, White brought an international perspective to mining the local. He loved gossip and was an acute observer of humanity. A dedicated user of public transport, he had a finely tuned ear that could distil poetry from the thorns and nettles of the Australian vernacular. In White’s plays as well as his prose, it is often the most inarticulate utterances that yield the most meaning. In The Vivisector, the grocer Cutbush, when pushed on whether he believes in God, gives this response: ‘That’s what we were taught, wasn’t it? I’m not going back on that. That is, I wouldn’t be prepared to say I don’t exactly not believe.’ With an all-too-finite vocab in their existential toolkit, his characters grapple, Beckett-like, with the enormity around them. White’s capacity for bathos was formidable – and seldom more punishing than in his attitude to nationhood and the sacred cows that graze around its base. Speaking in 1984, he argued that ‘those with genuine love of their heritage have begun to wonder whether nationalism, in its overheated fuzz of artificially inseminated patriotism, is all that desirable’. His aversion to Australian jingoism deepened in tandem with his growing concern for the AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

land’s First Nations peoples, about whom he gradually became better informed. I suspect that White’s supranational outlook and his caution in even classifying himself as ‘an Australian’ are among the reasons why he has receded from view, at least in his own country. He was near the end of his life in 1988 when Australia threw its birthday party to commemorate the 200 years since British arrival. Appalled that a date so unholy for Indigenous Australians could be officially celebrated, White prohibited the publication or performance of his work for the entire bicentennial year. ‘More than anything, it was the need for justice for the Aborigines which put me against the Bi,’ he explained. ‘Aborigines may not be shot and poisoned as they were in the early days of colonisation, but there are subtler ways of disposing of them.’

White’s capacity for bathos was formidable and seldom more punishing than in his attitude to nationhood In the decades since ‘the Bi’, Australia Day has not diminished as many of us who protested against it had hoped. Instead, it has boomed like a mushroom cloud, morphing into an increasingly grotesque display of national chauvinism and white pride. White’s assessment that, at a spiritual and psychological level, the possessors of the nation are themselves deeply dispossessed remains as pertinent as it is unwelcome in the prevailing political discourse. The Australian emptiness that White hoped to populate is of course an inner state, a self stripped bare. And while it required a specific geography to give it symbolic form, it is ultimately a human – not a national – condition that he was trying to articulate and understand. That idea of peopling the void through language is there in all the major novels: The Tree of Man, Riders in the Chariot (1961), The Solid Mandala (1966), The Vivisector, to name a few. For White the relationship between the inner self and the body’s shell is as abrasive as it is sublime. Perhaps that’s why it required the liminal geography of a place like Castle Hill, landed somewhere between the bush and the outer suburbs, to get the corpus rolling.

was introduced to White’s writing at Sydney University in the mid-1980s, sampling a few of the short stories in my first year. My strongest, if undergraduate, impression was of the earthiness of the writing: the vulgar ratbaggery of Sarsaparilla, with its crazed loners, mongrel dogs, and scarcely less feral children. There is a gentle humour and a deep compassion to White’s portrayal of ‘the underprivileged’, and while he created some truly great upper-crust characters, he could be especially savage towards his own class. This must have irritated Leonie Kramer, the professor of Australian literature at Sydney. A Dame of the British Empire, she ruled the department in imperial style. ‘Killer Kramer’, as he dubbed her, was famously no friend of White, whose increasingly leftist politics were diametrically opposed to her own. She favoured the poetry of James McAuley and A.D. Hope, both professors of English (the latter from Canberra!). In a judgement that White never forgave, Hope had pilloried 46 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

The Tree of Man as ‘pretentious and illiterate verbal sludge’. Fortunately for us, there was a young lecturer, recently recruited, who managed to smuggle Voss onto the second-year syllabus. Voss (1957) is striking for the density of its observational detail and its rhythmic texture. There is an operatic extravagance to the character of both Voss and his romantic interest, Laura Trevelyan, with whom he enjoys something resembling telepathic communication as he strides boldly into the wilderness. You can smell and taste the country traversed by Voss’s expedition, yet there are only faint nods to the naturalism that in White’s day was the default mode of nearly all Australian fiction. The portrayal of Voss’s quest to discover inland Australia is sweetly ironic and adroitly calibrated to a world that in the 1950s was nominally struggling to decolonise. Voss’s one-way journey into the desert leads him not to the anticipated enlightenment of discovery but to the excesses of his own hubris, which ultimately destroy him. Through allegory, White could cross the threshold that Walt Whitman described as the point ‘beyond which philosophy cannot go and does not wish to go’. In his evocation of Voss’s monomania and narcissism, White examines how exploration is not so much a process of observation as an act of projection on the part of the expedition leader. To interrogate the ‘heroics’ of exploring may not seem especially original today, when statues of imperial figures are being ripped down with such vehemence. But White was well ahead of the game. He made the point in 1957, nearly forty years before postcolonial critics ‘discovered’ similar fault lines in the exploration project. Needless to say, they did not describe them with anything approximating White’s complexity or poetic force. For those devotees of White’s writing, he remains as relevant as ever thirty years on. David Marr has no doubt that White will resurface as an essential author, but he suggests that a period in the shade is almost to be expected for novelists who have died in recent decades, even for the greats. It takes time to read the big books; and time for so many of us is in short supply, even when we are locked down in a pandemic. Understandably, living writers get press and critical attention. The novel as an art form is in rude health, with more good books being published than anyone can read. Another reason why White is less read than he should be has to do with political changes. The identity-based politics that presently absorb so much oxygen would have bored White rigid. His own political awakening was, as he confessed, heavily retarded. He began as a political agnostic and evolved into an interventionist. Like Lascaris, he regretted that he took so long to recognise the obscenity of fascism, despite having visited Germany under Hitler. On returning to Australia in 1948, he voted unthinkingly for conservative candidates, as Whites had done for generations. The 1960s changed everything. With actual experience of war under his belt, he had good reason to revile it, whether hot or cold. When Gough Whitlam became leader of the Labor Party in 1967, promising an end to imperial kowtowing and the withdrawal of Australian troops from Vietnam, White supported him. In 1975, he protested vociferously against the sacking of Whitlam’s government by the queen’s representative. White’s speeches and other public interventions on subjects ranging from nuclear disarmament to urban conservation are

guaranteed to deliver if you want sufficiently numerous to fill to build a fence, swimming pool, a volume titled Patrick White coal mine, or public lavatory. So Speaks (1990). A noticeable abit is especially noticeable that in sence in its pages is gay rights. a practical, nuts-and-bolts way, Despite his being one of the Australia has neglected to acmost prominent gay men in knowledge the presence of the country, this was one cause White in the landscape he frethat White eschewed. Viewquented. He’s out there, but he ing sexuality as an essentially is not part of the material fabric private matter, he chided fans of our lives. of Mardi Gras for ‘walking I feel this personally, having up Oxford Street with your grown up in north-west Sydney handbags’. Perhaps White had in a house that was only seven thought too much about the kilometres from Showground depths of human identity to Road. We lived not in Castle Hill be much interested in political but in the adjoining suburb of labelling: ‘I see myself not so West Pennant Hills. White and much a homosexual as a mind Lascaris moved from Dogwoods possessed by the spirit of man the year I was born, so I did not or woman according to actual unknowingly pass them at the situations or the characters I shopping centre. But the fact become in my writing.’ remains that I was brought up in Perhaps for White the Sarsaparilla, or near enough to it. assertion of an identity-based The striking thing is that no one politics ran the risk of reprotold me at the time and I never ducing tribalism in another worked it out for myself until form. Much more so than has long after the happy day when I been acknowledged, his own made my exit. politics were grounded in conCompare Australia and cern about economic injustice. White with the relationship He enjoyed a materially privibetween localities and their writleged existence as he knew well Figure in a garden (The aunt), 1945, by Roy de Maistre ers that is common in Britain. enough. It is said that by the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Gift of Patrick White, 1974 Whether it’s Austen and Bath or end of his life the lion’s share of © Roy de Maistre Estate (AGNSW) Dickens and London or Hardy his income was going to philanthropic causes. Unlike many who are born into money, White and Wessex, places and authors are connected. They speak to thought long and hard about his family’s fortune and the land that each other. Guidebooks, plaques, and rituals of visitation connect yielded such prosperity, but at such a cost. The cult of wealth he so literary works with their geographical origins. At their worst, despised was alive and well in Sydney, which has always exhibited these practices can encourage thoughtless genuflection to the cult an unwholesome blend of glitz, sparkle, sleaze, and opportunism; of the author. At their best, they provide a way of rendering in it is a city where the homeless rummage ‘in garbage bins among gestural form the benefits that creative works bring to our lives. the lobster and oyster shells’, as White himself inimitably put it. A cottage industry of guided tours and history walks supports I have one last thought about why White has become a Great these enthusiasms. That’s very different to growing up in SarsaUnread. Australia, as is often remarked, is a practical country, parilla and not knowing it.

Eliza Hamilton Dunlop Writing from the Colonial Frontier SYDNEY STUDIES IN AUSTRALIAN LITERATURE

AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Eccleston Street in London is not the only location that would benefit from a blue plaque acknowledging White. ‘Dogwoods’ on Showground Road is now home to a legal firm. You can look at the house from the footpath, but if you seek some residue of its famous occupant, turn to the street-map, not the streetscape. As was predicted in the concluding pages of The Tree of Man, the tide of suburbia flooded Sarsaparilla and eventually drowned it. In the subdivided land that White and Lascaris tilled, there is a trilogy of street names that may or may not mean something to those who live there: Patrick Avenue, White Place, and Nobel Place.

White’s supranational outlook and his caution in classifying himself as ‘an Australian’ are among the reasons why he has receded from view The house on Martin Road at Centennial Park has received greater recognition. The New South Wales government has nominated it as a site of heritage significance, perhaps in hope of quietening a chorus of White admirers who, after Lascaris’s death, argued that the state should acquire it as a writers’ centre or museum. This was deemed unaffordable and the house was sold at auction, where someone in the finance industry bought it as a private residence. The house of White’s childhood, Lulworth, is now a nursing home, and in that guise it still has tales to tell. How poignant it is that Lascaris, who outlived White by thirteen years, spent the last three months of his life in that institution. (Another late-life resident was White’s old foe, Leonie Kramer.) That there are no plaques on these buildings is typical of Sydney, the Emerald City as they call her. Sydney doesn’t really do plaques. During the real-estate bubble, the notion that a building has heritage is as heretical as any other encumbrance to an owner’s right to knock it down. Blue plaques in themselves won’t get people reading The Eye of the Storm or The Tree of Man. They are demanding books. But they could play some small role in encouraging a culture that is genuinely curious about the places we inhabit and the ideas they spawn. White was fully cognisant of the danger and irresponsibility of failing to plumb the depths of the world we occupy. ‘A pragmatic nation, we tend to confuse reality with surfaces. Perhaps this dedication to surface is why

we are constantly fooled by the crooks who mostly govern us.’ White could never get used to Australia as a national or political system – too many rogues, too much bad blood and unsettled business – but as a place it breathed inside him. In the Western Desert of Egypt during the war, he was overwhelmed by memories of ‘frosty mornings on the Monaro, with sulphur-crested cockatoos toppling the stooked oats; floodwaters of the Barwon and Namoi through which I swam my horse to fetch the mail; the peppertrees and cracked asphalt of steamy Sydney streets’. Summoned to Australia by these impressions, he brought with him the carapaces of memory borne by all true travellers. As memories from afar continued to resonate, Castle Hill become somewhere for him and Lascaris. There is a trace of London in the Castle Hill they knew. There is Roy de Maistre and the lipstick smile of Francis Bacon. There are bombs falling on London and the caress of the beautiful soldier, lost to history. Without those ties to elsewhere, the Castle Hill in which White lived could only be Castle Hill. It could never have become Sarsaparilla. Patrick White populated the local with a world of connections. This, too, says something about why he is being ignored and why, more importantly, we need him now. The pandemic has atomised us; made us cellular to an extent we would never have envisaged. No man is an island, but insularity is the very thing demanded of us. We are seeing it not only at the personal level, but in the borders that pin us in place. Trumpism and Brexit are all about walls and lines and checkpoints: the infrastructure of the xenophobe. The very union of the United Kingdom is now uncertain. In Australia, borders between states can suddenly become uncrossable. How unnatural this is. At a certain basic level, it makes no sense. Hence the need to understand the ways in which nations do not define us. In so doing, we might draw inspiration and a little solace from a brilliant, reluctant, and sometimes cantankerous Australian who happened to be a Londoner at heart. g Martin Thomas is Professor of History at the Australian National University. His prizes include the 2013 Calibre Essay Prize and the National Biography Award for The Many Worlds of R.H. Mathews (2011). He is presently based at King’s College London, where he co-directs the Menzies Australia Institute. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

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The Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award The parodic inventiveness of Gwen Harwood

by Ann-Marie Priest

or much of her career, Gwen Harwood (1920–95) was best known for her hoaxes, pseudonyms, and literary tricks. Most notorious was the so-called Bulletin hoax in 1961, but over the years she orchestrated a number of other raids on literary targets, mainly aimed at challenging the power of poetry editors and gatekeepers. For L’Affaire Bulletin (as she sometimes called it), she submitted to that august magazine, under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, a pair of seemingly unexceptionable sonnets on the theme of Abelard and Eloisa. Only after the poems were published did the Bulletin discover that they were acrostics; read vertically, one spelled out ‘So long Bulletin’, and the other, ‘Fuck all editors’. The first could have passed as a harmless joke, but the second threatened to bring the Vice Squad down on the Bulletin’s hapless editor, Donald Horne. He was not amused, and newspapers around the country echoed his tone of injured outrage. The appearance in print of an obscene word was shocking enough, but the revelation that the author of the sonnets was actually a woman turned shock to horror. To many in Australian society, it was an article of faith that, as an acquaintance of Harwood’s put it, ‘No WOMAN would ever write such a word.’ ‘I had a mental picture, as I heard her pronunciation of “WOMAN”, of little bluebirds with daisies in their beaks,’ Harwood wrote wryly. She had hoped to be hailed as a hero, like the creators of the ‘Ern Malley’ hoax. Her hoax had been designed to show up the corruption, as she saw it, of editors who published inferior poems on dubious grounds while rejecting competent work (such as her own). But instead of being praised for shining a light on murky editorial practices, she found herself forced to defend her femininity. ‘What kind of PERSON is this Mrs Harwood?’ asked a horrified Nancy Keesing. The answer, alas, was that she was the kind of person who was happy to use the F-word, and who would scorn to pretend she wasn’t. The particular formulation she adopted for her hoax sonnet was probably derived from a song she had often heard on the lips of soldiers in Brisbane during the war. That irrepressibly memorable ditty began: ‘Fuck ’em all, fuck ’em all, the long and the

short and the tall’, and went on to specify particular targets in ‘the Sergeants and WO1s’, as well as ‘the corporals and their bleedin’ sons’. Fifteen years later, she adapted this satisfying construction to the literary context in a letter to her friend Thomas (Tony) Riddell, an aspiring playwright who, like her, was struggling with multiple rejections: ‘Fuck all the judges and editors too, fuck all the critics and their stinking crew ...’ The sonnet she subsequently wrote (and sent, with Tony’s collusion, to a number of editors) was a more succinct version of this sentiment. Of course, her occasional fondness for a good curse-word does not begin to answer the question of what kind of person Mrs Harwood was. She was a loving wife and mother, a fierce friend, an adventurous lover, and a brilliant, and brilliantly inventive, poet.

Image courtesy of Ann-Marie Priest

As the artist Edwin Tanner once put it, there was ‘a very strange intensity’ about her, as though she had ‘the depth & intelligence of two’. She was easily bored, as she herself confessed, and when bored, ‘extremely mischievous’. This was very much in evidence in Harwood’s hoaxes. Even before the Bulletin affair, she wrote a series of hoax poems under the pseudonym Francis Geyer, hoping to trick editors into publishing works that looked like poetry but were completely meaningless. One such poem was ‘All Souls’, which James McAuley accepted for Quadrant in late 1960, after years of rejecting almost AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

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everything Harwood sent him under her own name. She was disheartened to be proved right (as she then believed) about McAuley’s execrable judgement. ‘All Souls’ was a mere ‘mishmash religious poem’, but McAuley had fallen for it. He had even written Geyer ‘a little note’ saying he was ‘an interesting poet’. To Harwood, this was proof that McAuley’s supposed ‘brilliance is about 15 watts’. At Meanjin, Clem Christesen had similarly snapped up Geyer’s ‘Landfall’ and ‘Mid-Ocean’, poems Harwood had written ‘in a few moments, a collage of literary scraps’. All three poems she considered to be ‘very pretty but quite meaningless’. (Critics, incidentally, did not agree. Chris Wallace-Crabbe would later describe ‘All Souls’ as the best thing in her second book. He included it in his anthology The Golden Apples of the Sun [1980].) Of the same vintage as the Bulletin hoax was a Harwood poem entitled ‘The Sentry’, which was actually written – with Harwood’s knowledge and collusion – by Melbourne poet and academic Vincent Buckley. She was delighted when it was accepted by Meanjin in late 1961, and later chosen for Angus & Robertson’s annual Australian Poetry anthology. ‘Is it yours? Is it mine? Or the Muse’s’, she chortled in a postcard to Vin: Whose hand drove the talented pen? With the right hand that never refuses a guinea, I signed it. Yours, Gwen.

Both Harwood and Buckley kept the secret of the true authorship of this poem, though word leaked out that there was some mystery about it. In Brisbane, a young Thomas Shapcott, tipped off by a friend of Buckley’s, puzzled over it, writing to Wallace-Crabbe that if it was a parody, he couldn’t see whom it was parodying. Shapcott, who was ‘fascinated by [Harwood’s] antics’, soon began a correspondence with her, which developed into a lasting friendship. Her acrostics inspired him to write one of his own. In 1963, ‘Return is not Again’ appeared in the Bulletin, its acrostic message, a phrase from Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, reading ‘Kiss Gwennie Where She Says’. Harwood was delighted. But when he asked her about ‘The Sentry’, she played dumb: ‘Whaddyer mean, “trick or puzzle”?’ She went on to include the poem in her first book, giving no hint that it was not her own work. Buckley was her most skilled impersonator. Late in 1961, he wrote a parody of Geyer entitled ‘Dead Guitars’, which he submitted to Meanjin under Geyer’s name. This time, Harwood knew nothing of his plan. When she opened Meanjin to discover an unknown poem by her own alter ego, she ‘felt like a sniper who’d got one in the bum’. Buckley was now poetry editor of the Bulletin, and she took her revenge by sending him a new Geyer poem, ‘Soiree’, that contained yet another acrostic (‘Mon Semblable, Mon Frere’). When he unwittingly published it, she sent him a gleeful note. Some seven years later, still enamoured of the art of parody, she inaugurated the Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award, inviting some of her young poet-friends to write a poem featuring her character Kröte for a chance at the grand prize of ‘1 beaut fruit-cake’. Geyer had originated Kröte, but Geyer had long since been unmasked (by Shapcott and Rodney Hall, as it turned out), so Harwood had taken Kröte over herself. A European-trained musician who had somehow got stuck in Australian suburbia,

Kröte was often drunk, and always bitter at a plebeian world that simply did not appreciate him. He was spiky and malicious, and while Gwen thought of him as a comic character, there was pathos in his struggle to relinquish his dream of being a great artist. Gwen told Tony that when she read back through her Kröte poems, she could see herself in him.

‘What kind of PERSON is this Mrs Harwood?’ asked a horrified Nancy Keesing For the Fruitcake Award, she gave competitors the first verse of a poem they were to ‘Complete in four (or more) tetrameter quatrains’: ‘Honours candidates are expected to express three of the following: anguish, humour, political indifference, gaiety, sexuality, boredom.’ The stanza she wrote to start them off clearly belonged to a comic poem: Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping that Bee Piece from a violin. There’s little prospect of escaping back to the green room & his gin …

Roger McDonald, who was then working as poetry editor at the University of Queensland Press, took Gwen’s instructions seriously, sending her a poem he described as ‘a student piece, which is written to exemplify the six humours as located by Professor Eisenbart in Herr Kröte, during a cerebral dissection at the bar of the “New Sydney” Hotel’. His poem begins: The Problem of Kröte: Doppelganger as Alcoholic Boredom He scratches a note with his toe, from timber – nobody registers karri on suede; And then upon teeth he rattles a number ad-lib, called Ivory Tribute To Jade. Sexuality The fiddler pauses from pizzicato feeling upstaged but not sure why. Kröte catches the stare of a widow whose addiction to teeth is urgently sly. Gaiety ‘I’ve another appointment’, sings Kröte, rising up from his stool at the rim of the stage. The widow flashes a bottle of Riesling which Kröte knows to be hopping with age. …

Shapcott seems to have entered more than once, but only the second of his entries – written, presumably, after he read Roger’s – is extant. His parody begins: The Problem of Kröte: Doppelganger as Hanger-on … Between him and his easeful tippling AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

lies a no-man’s-land of floor Where already Mums are rippling, determined for the last encore. By a groaning board with aspic, lamingtons and passionfruit-cream Mrs Cholmondley eyes the heretic, and her teeth set in a beam. Carnal thoughts plunge to her bosom (metaphorically of course), In her heart she’s young and lissom, moaning, and will yield to force …

The winning entry, however, was Buckley’s. Gwen sent copies of the typescript of his poem, complete with Vin’s dedication to her and his signature, to the unsuccessful entrants. It begins: The Flight of the Bumble Bee Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping That Bee Thing from a violin. There’s little prospect of escaping back to the green room & his gin. A piece concerned with flight – symbolic! He murmurs, pianissimo. Somebody hisses ‘Alcoholic’ Audibly from the nearest row. That woman with the bust! That bumbling Amateur with an insect heart. Heaven preserve me from all fumbling spear-holders on the stage of Art. Drunk, often. Alcoholic, never! Here come those octaves-and-a-third. Madam, I could play on forever, Thinks Kröte, playing his absurd Pantomime of a great musician Wrestling hard with his instrument. The fiddler’s nervous disposition Rapidly throws him off the scent …

Announcing the winner to Shapcott on one of her legendary home-made Sappho cards, Gwen wrote: Vin Buckley sits with sparkling eyes, drinking the blood-red wine; he’s won the Kröte Fruitcake Prize for 1969. When Evan Jones of Melbourne Town stands by to beg a slice Vin Buckley merely wolfs it down exclaiming, ‘My! How nice!’ 52 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

Useless to mark my Muse’s place OCCUPIED or NO ENTRY When Vin, without a change of face, can write this, or The Sentry. Candidates less successful plough through pies, or fish-and-chips, but Vin, with laurels on his brow, holds fruitcake to his lips.

This was the end, seemingly, of the Harwood Memorial Fruitcake Award. Harwood had another hoax under way at the time: she was masquerading as Timothy Kline, an angry young man of the same generation as Shapcott, Hall, and McDonald, who was writing anti-Vietnam War poems, among other things, with great success. It was not until the early 1970s that she turned her mind to her third volume of poetry, which would also be her first Selected. Among the new poems, she decided to include a handful of Kröte works: ‘Matinee’, which had first appeared in Australian Poetry 1969, and two previously unpublished poems, ‘A Small Victory’ and ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’. The latter poem, as it appeared in her 1975 book, was identical in almost every respect to Buckley’s prize-winning entry in the Fruitcake Award. (Buckley’s version began each line with a capital letter, while Harwood’s – in keeping with her long-established practice – did not.) As with ‘The Sentry’, she gave no indication in the book that this poem was not, in fact, written by her. Presumably, Buckley, Shapcott, and McDonald (and possibly others), were in on the joke, but none of them seems to have mentioned it either. There is an odd codicil to the story of ‘The Flight of the Bumble Bee’. In the late 1980s, in a letter to Kevin Hart lamenting the demise of parody, Harwood explained that she had ‘once invited several poets I knew to complete a Kröte poem (giving them the first verse of “Kröte plays for a fiddler scraping that bee thing from his violin”)’. ‘The entries,’ she went on, ‘were so inept that I wrote it myself and thought for a while about the nature of parody.’ If this is true, it is difficult (though not, perhaps, impossible) to explain the typescript signed by Vin Buckley. Certainly, as a parody, it is exceptionally brilliant, replicating not only the style of Harwood’s Kröte poems but also their themes and diction. On the other hand, it would be entirely characteristic of her to add another layer to the story of this poem, perhaps with an eye to the frustration of future scholars (the ‘PhDs’ she often refers to with benign contempt in her letters). ‘How far can this go?’ she once asked of Buckley’s parody of Geyer’s hoax poems. ‘Copies of fakes of copies of fakes?’ The answer seems to be as open as it ever was. g Ann-Marie Priest is a humanities scholar at Central Queensland University with a special interest in Australian women writers and biography. Her biography of Gwen Harwood, My Tongue Is My Own, for which she received the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, will be published by Black Inc. in 2022. This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Poetry

Sparrow in winter A new translation of Beowulf Lisa Gorton

Beowulf: A new translation

translated by Maria Dahvana Headley

Scribe $27.99 pb, 176 pp

nly one manuscript of Beowulf has survived. It was in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. Cotton had been a student of that careful genius William Camden, who, through a lifetime’s work, formulated a different view of history: not the record of victory but the recollection of lost worlds and times. He and his fellow Antiquarians searched out fragments and ruins: Roman urns in the fields, Saxon burials under St Paul’s, a giant’s thighbone under a London cellar. They collected ancient manuscripts. From the age of eighteen, Cotton began to amass his library. When he heard that the astrologer and alchemist John Dee had buried a bundle of manuscripts in a field, Cotton ‘bought the field to digge after it’ ( John Aubrey, Brief Lives). He found a copy of the Magna Carta in a tailor’s workshop. He bought the whole room in Fotheringay Castle where Mary Stuart was beheaded and had it rebuilt in his own house. Cotton’s library was six feet wide and twenty-four feet long. He named his bookshelves after the various busts he placed on top of them. The manuscript of Beowulf is named Vitellius, A. XV. because it was under the bust of Vitellius, on the top shelf, fifteen books from the left. Ben Jonson and Francis Bacon visited his library. So did parliamentarians, seeking ancient precedent for rights of parliament against the imperious impulses of Charles I. Cotton was imprisoned over a pamphlet. The king’s supporters took it to be a satire – a preposterously exaggerated version – of their opinions. As it turned out, the pamphlet had been written for the king’s father, James I. Charles’s heir being born during the hearing, Charles released the prisoners. Still, Cotton was locked out of his library. His face changed, said his friend Simon D’Ewes, ‘into a grim blackish paleness’. He died a year later. ‘They had broken his heart,’ said D’Ewes, ‘who had locked up his library from him’ ( Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell, 1833). Some generations later, Cotton’s library became the property of the nation. In October 1731, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported, under ‘Casualties’: A Fire broke out in the House of Mr Bently … which burnt down that part of the House that contained the King’s and Cottonian Libraries. Almost all the printed Books were consumed and part of the Manuscripts …

The librarian Dr Bentley, it was said, leapt out of a window.

He wore a wig and a nightgown; he had the Codex Alexandrinus under one arm. The heat of the fire left the pages of Beowulf, said one restorer, ‘compressed and corrugated, with the edges burnt, and in many cases, broken, torn, and dirtied’. The manuscript has been restored, sometimes helpfully, over hundreds of years. Now the British Museum has photographs of it online: its pages – inlaid, rebound – eroded at the edges. Some of the poem is lost. It is perhaps a fitting history for a poem about time’s heroes and monsters, its hoards and ruins. But Beowulf ’s precarious history makes for uncertainty: about the age of the manuscript; about the age of the poem it records; about some of the words in it.

The poem deserves to be rescued from the racist and sexist legacy of many of its translators The manuscript is thought to date from early in the eleventh century, or earlier. The poem’s proem describes the founding of the Scylding dynasty. As Kevin S. Kiernan points out in Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript (1981, 1996), this suggests the manuscript was written after 1016, when the Scylding Cnut the Great conquered England. Cnut’s father, Swein Forkbeard, had spent decades pillaging and plundering. Some raiders killed their prisoner the bishop of Canterbury Ælfheah, for instance, by pelting him with bones from their feast. A manuscript celebrating the ancient deeds of Danes and Scyldings (argues Kiernan) is more likely to have been written after the decades of terror and carnage when a Danish Scylding ruled the kingdom. Two scribes wrote out the manuscript. The poem’s narrator is Christian; its warriors live in a faraway, long-ago world of ring-fealty and blood-feuds. ‘They bent themselves to idols,’ says the narrator. ‘That was their nature, these heathens, hoping at the wrong heavens …’ Beowulf starts and ends with a funeral: it draws all its warriors’ feats briefly out of oblivion. It was already, in the scribes’ time, an old poem – or, at the least, was written to sound like an old poem. This gap – of time, of place, of perspective – between the poem’s narrator and its characters raises another uncertainty: what relationship the manuscript had to oral tradition. It’s like that debate about Homer and The Iliad and The Odyssey: whether Homer should be considered the author of those works or the ‘label’ for a long oral tradition set down in writing at last (see, for instance, Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The early reception of epic, 2002). For a long time, Beowulf scholars took the poem to be a jumble of old stories, a source. They sought, through it, their own unlovely purposes: evidence in Schleswig-Holstein territorial disputes; evidence of Teutonic warrior-prowess. It was Tolkien who, in his 1936 lecture ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, convincingly asserted the value of the poem as a poem, a work of conscious artistry, and in that way helped to inaugurate popular modern translations by, among others, Edwin Morgan, Michael Alexander, Seamus Heaney, and now, Maria Dahvana Headley. Headley’s novel The Mere Wife (2018) retold Beowulf from the perspective of Grendel’s mother. In the book, Grendel’s mother is an army veteran suffering from PTSD and amnesia in suburban America. She lives in the mountains by a lake, AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

but her son Gren is drawn to the fenced estate of Herot, where the rich white wife Willa lives in a mansion within a gated community. The Mere Wife, a clever retelling, recasts the poem as a conflict of race and class in contemporary America. In doing so, it challenges the racism that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon scholars and translators brought to their interpretation of the poem’s ‘monsters’. In perhaps its nadir, the translator John-Josias Conybeare glossed Grendel: ‘In later ages, a Highlander, an American Indian, or even a runaway Negro, have assumed, in the eyes of their more civilized neighbours, the same aspect of terror and mystery’ ( John Josias Conybeare, Illustrations of Anglo-Saxon Poetry, 1826). Headley’s The Mere Wife, and also her Beowulf, follow John Gardner’s novel Grendel (1971), Edwin Morgan’s long poem ‘Grendel’ (1976–81), and Toni Morrison’s essay ‘Grendel and His Mother’ (in The Source of Self-Regard, 2019): they sympathise with the ‘monsters’. Headley is right, I think, that the poem needs and deserves to be rescued from the racist and sexist legacy of many of its translators. As it happens, in Beowulf there is a runaway slave fleeing a brutal master; the narrator’s sympathy is with the slave. Whoever wrote Beowulf recovered stories from a tradition that the Roman poet and diplomat Sidonius Apollinaris (c.430–489), for instance, considered ‘barbarian thrumming’. He complained in a letter to Catullinus: Why – even supposing I had the skill – do you bid me compose a song … placed as I am among long-haired hordes, having to endure German speech, praising oft with wry face the song of the gluttonous Burgundian who spreads rancid butter on his hair? Do you want me to tell you what wrecks all poetry? Driven away by barbarian thrumming the Muse has spurned the six-footed exercise ever since she beheld these patrons seven feet high. (translated by W.B. Anderson, 1936)

The Beowulf poet heard something else in that ‘barbarian thrumming’ of ‘patrons seven feet high’. It is a defining question for Beowulf’s translators: what are these ‘monsters’? Or, how can this melancholy, digressive poem, with its feeling for customary life, and its avowed Christianity, contain such creatures: the flesh-eating Grendel, descendant of Cain, tormented by the sound of harps; his avenging mother, the strongest fighter in the poem, living under a mere; and a fire-breathing dragon, distraught at the theft of a golden cup? They are real within the world of the poem; they are, at the same time, from the narrator’s perspective, eschatological. This kind of split and doubling gives the poem its peculiar force: the golden hall, the hall under the mere, the golden hoard: all are closed in; all are broken open. Its warriors are great; its warriors are burned on the pyre. Or, as Edwin Morgan’s long poem from Grendel’s point of view starts: ‘It is being nearly human / gives me this spectacular darkness.’ Headley’s introduction starts: ‘My love affair with Beowulf began with Grendel’s mother.’ Headley argues for a new interpretation of a textual crux. At one point in the manuscript, Grendel’s mother is described as a ‘mere-wyl[-]’. Did that scribe mean wylf (wolf ) or wyf (lady)? Which is to say: how human is Grendel’s mother? Headley’s translation emphasises the mother’s warriorstrength. Where Seamus Heaney’s translation describes her as ‘that 54 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

swamp-thing from hell, / the tarn-hag in all her terrible strength’, Headley has ‘the reclusive night-queen, / the mighty mere-wife’. It is a lesson in how background assumptions shape translation. Headley’s translation of Beowulf emphasises immediacy. ‘Bro,’ it starts. In her introduction, Headley explains: ‘I did spend a lot of time imagining the narrator as an old-timer at the end of the bar, periodically pounding his glass and demanding another. I saw it with my own eyes.’ As this might suggest, Headley’s translation treats Beowulf as a poem of the oral tradition. There is much to be said for this. In his 1936 essay, Tolkien remarked that, ‘the diction of Beowulf was poetical, archaic, artificial (if you will), in the day the poem was made’. As a consequence, the poem has suffered some terrible translations. One starts, ‘What ho!’ Perhaps it could be said that not all archaisms are alike; the Anglo-Saxon ones are archaic after their own fashion: they are kennings, at once thingy and strange. They find no equivalent in ‘eftsoon’. Headley wants, she says, a ‘bloody and juicy’ poem. Against, for instance, Heaney’s closely worked, consistent, ‘foursquare’ language, Headley has taken words from everywhere all at once, seemingly at random. ‘His words were heard and heralded, / and yes, yes, bro! The man was more than just talk.’ Sometimes such knowingness cloys, particularly in the proem, in some brutal adaptations of Sylvia Plath’s poem ‘Daddy’: ‘we all know a boy can’t daddy / till his daddy’s dead’; and, ‘daddying for decades after his own daddy died’. It seems as though some parts of the poem bored Headley into inordinate alliteration. Headley’s is a free, novelistic rewriting of the poem; it does not try to capture the compactness of the original, with its four-stress lines. But, when the characters speak, when the set-up is dramatic, this translation has passages of clarity and imagination: ‘She raised her voice in mourning, keening for her kin / as the pyre was lit … Fire comes from the same / family as famine.’ In its desire for immediacy, Headley’s translation sacrifices that curious time-structure in Beowulf: the narrator’s distance from the poem’s characters. Headley imagines the storyteller saying, ‘I saw it with my own eyes.’ But the narrator of Beowulf doesn’t see it all happening as it happens; the narrator announces, before Beowulf ’s last fight, that Beowulf will die. The poem makes such dramatic irony into a tragic irony of time. For its characters, the poems’ world is fierce, immediate, and uncertain; for the narrator, that world is finished. What remains of it is the poem: a wrought thing. The poem in its original has sometimes only four (compound) words in a line. Its sense is compressed into its sounds; its sounds make a structure in time. It remembers, but it does not save. That feeling of distance in time is what makes sense of the poem’s strange structure. Beowulf has a beginning and an ending and, between them, a gap of fifty years; its beginning and its ending are opposed and bound. The structure of the whole poem recalls the structure of a single line of Anglo-Saxon poetry, which has two sides with a caesura between them; across that gap, alliteration binds the line together. In the beginning, Beowulf goes to help an ageing king who has ruled fifty years in a hall of gold and now faces a monster he cannot defeat. Beowulf kills Grendel and Grendel’s mother and returns, a hero, to his own king, and says what happened. Fifty years later, Beowulf is an ageing king who has ruled fifty years in a hall of peace and now

is faced with a dragon he dies defeating. The treasure of a forgotten world lies in the earth. A slave, creeping into a rock crevice, finds a golden cup, and wakes the dragon sleeping with the hoard. That treasure-cup from a ruined world is brought from the dark to ruin another world. Time’s ruin goes forwards and back. That stolen cup is the image and opposite of the golden cup that the golden Queen Welhtheow once passed from warrior to warrior in the golden hall of Heorot. It is as if, said Bede,

inside there is a comforting fire to warm the room; outside, the wintry storms of snow and rain are raging. This sparrow flies swiftly in through one door of the hall, and out through the other… [and] vanishes from sight into the darkness … (A History of the English Church and People, 1955)

Lisa Gorton is a poet, novelist, critic, and former poetry editor of Australian Book Review. Her most recent poetry collection is Empirical (2019).

Poetry

Blurring the lines Three new poetry collections James Antoniou

ew books blur the line between beauty and ugliness more than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). The novella follows the ageing writer Aschenbach, whose absurd over-refinement – born in part of repressed homosexuality – is dismantled by Tadzio, a beautiful boy he encounters on holiday in Venice. His obsession with Tadzio represents the displacement of mortality (Aschenbach will soon succumb to cholera) through a wilful surrender to decadence and decay. Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous (Giramondo Publishing, $24 pb, 102 pp), a polyphonic suite of verse from Filipino poet Mark Anthony Cayanan, claims to ‘loosely [channel] the dynamic of desire and inhibition’ in Mann’s novella. In fact, it does something quite different. It is written in the ‘fourth person’, an ill-defined chorus of voices marked by tenuous fluidity of self. Protean identities – unfixed and ‘unfinishable’ – respond to and resist Aschenbach’s repression and rigidity, against a drastically different moral and political backdrop. The interior monologues alternate between two modes: prose poems written ‘as Aschenbach’ that border on literary criticism, and others adapting the book’s theme through a contemporary queer lens and with oblique reference to the current political situation in the Philippines. Familiarity with Mann isn’t essential but will help readers to appreciate Cayanan’s insights. They are particularly astute on Aschenbach’s self-dramatising tendencies: ‘scenarios of unsanctioned passion are swaths of an inner life repurposed from bourgeois melodrama’. ‘There’s no knowing now,’ begins another poem; ‘knowing dignity’s no longer a reason to keep alive a life that precludes abandon’. Cayanan’s lexicon is unabashedly rococo, the syntax synco-

pated. The voices that emerge are uncanny, breathless, enfolded in an ironised, swirling grandeur characteristic of Mann, as in this almost parodic homage: Tadzio, you’re the tired gold of sunset, of ardour and unused heat, of horses drowning in the sea. There’s tulle over the lampshade, tulle of the landscape, Tadzio. Mine, mine, the white word admonishes the world.

Cayanan counterbalances Aschenbach’s ‘queer tragedy’ with vignettes of modern travel and life on the Filipino streets. These prevent the book’s exploration of selfhood from becoming too insular or claustrophobic, and add a postcolonial layer to the commentary. Once Aschenbach’s demise has been charted, though, Cayanan breaks decisively into a confessional, autobiographical mode that risks working too far against Aschenbach’s agonised dissimulation. ‘I enable my self-absorption,’ the speaker writes.‘I’m silly enough to think it makes me interesting.’ Some of the commentary can feel too glib: ‘Mann offloads his gay shame onto his characters’, for one. Even so, the final shift towards candour helps to resolve some tensions in Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous – not so much a ‘queer tragedy’ as a complex reworking of Death in Venice that leaves readers to ponder the new challenges and anxieties of modern queer life.

cience fiction tropes have found their way into much poetry over the last ten years – from Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (2011) to J.O. Morgan’s The Martian’s Regress (2020) – but none is quite as left field as Jerzy Beaumont’s Errant Night (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 78 pp), a verse story that uses interstellar travel as a semi-allegory for grief. In the midst of a Canberra winter, the speaker begins by declaring that ‘depression is [his] heart’s armour. Rusted shut,’ and follows this with the metaphor of constellations disappearing in the night sky. The speaker then takes off in his spaceship (‘built from schematics found on Reddit’) to find the missing stars.Flying over the capital, he collects ‘neon halos from street lights, fast food signs’, but these artificial stars are no substitute for the real thing. ‘I won’t be back,’ he writes, ‘until the night sky is flooded with light.’ It is a simple – almost pat – metaphor, but it is elaborated with the intricate world-building of a fantasy novel. With a sound dramatic hand, Beaumont describes his travails on Narcissau, a port city or ‘Cubist favela’ he finds after being made ‘homeless in space’. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

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African American Poetry David Mason

The work’s reliance on sci-fi tropes can seem to obfuscate the realities of grief as much as illuminate them. Certainly, you are left with the feeling that Beaumont might have a lot more to say about his own experiences, but there are also moments when the truth breaks through the grand metaphor. ‘It has been fifty-four days since you died. I think about you a lot. Wonder how many stars count your absence at night. Some things can’t be fixed.’ At the end, the speaker admits: ‘I never did find the stars, but I don’t mind.’ Errant Night presents readers with narrative poetry that is both epic and fugue. Some of the set pieces are as muddled as the processes of grief itself, but Jerzy Beaumont does in fact find a few stars. ‘It is not the avoidance of pain that will save me,’ he writes, ‘but the dedication to repair.’ This is a poet recuperating and slowly emerging. We owe him our attention and patience.

eanwhile, I Said the Sea was Folded: Love poems (Black Inc., $22.90 pb, 81 pp) – the début collection of Erik Jensen, co-founder of The Saturday Paper and editorin-chief of Schwartz Media – is presented, like Cayanan’s work, as an exploration of queer experience. It is easy to imagine how someone in love could write the sort of guileless sweet nothings in this book (the poems are addressed to Jensen’s partner Evelyn Ida Morris), but much harder to imagine how they could ever have been published. Jensen’s verse is woefully slight. It aims for gnomic profundity but tumbles into the mundane or mawkish every time. To say these snippets are like refined Instagram poems would insult the Rupi Kaurs of the world, who look like the height of emotional sophistication alongside Jensen. Here is ‘Second time’ in its entirety: ‘My favourite line / Is when you said / You were dreading / More chicken soup. / Later you asked / If it was Wednesday / When you made it / And whether it was still / Okay to eat.’ That is about as exciting as a shopping list. The poet seems to suffer from a journalist’s addiction to reportage. Such seismic personal events as making meatballs or ordering ‘milled beetroot / with a brick of cabbage’ at a restaurant are relayed with a plodding, dutiful accuracy. The result is dullness of the kind the poet himself tries to justify as a poetics of inarticulacy: ‘I don’t know if you read poetry,’ begins ‘Last Tuesday’; ‘I don’t know if I write it.’ Readers will know instantly. What is most striking is how few of these poems communicate anything meaningful about Ida Morris. The poem ‘Waiting’, which includes a lone note of poignancy (‘You say your childhood was purple feet / Made cold by the river’), is one of the few. Most of the others lose focus quickly, veering into ramblings such as that in ‘Glasses’: ‘This morning / You were smiling / And I wondered what / You could see / Without your glasses. / I just remembered / That last night / In my dreams / I wrestled an alligator.’ No doubt this has some private significance, but the whole book is like this. It does not translate into anything of artistic value for the general reader. g James Antoniou has written for Australian Book Review, The Age, The Australian, and Modern Poetry in Translation.

56 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

A R T S

Film

The dark years

Charles de Gaulle and the famous appel Lisa Harper Campbell

eneral Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) was an icon of the French Resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Lending his name to the postwar Gaullist myth that presented France as a collective, unalloyed nation of resistance fighters, de Gaulle (founder and president of the Fifth Republic from 1959 to 1969) became a symbol of French strength, determination, and honour during a divisive and turbulent period of history. Despite his status as one of the most influential figures in modern French history, or perhaps indeed because of it, de Gaulle has rarely been depicted on screen, a notable exception being Fred Zinnemann’s tense thriller The Day of the Jackal (1973). His presence in French films has often only been implied, filmmakers concluding that his voice, his profile, or even just his silhouette were respectfully adequate. Focusing on the events of mid-1940 (the beginning of the occupation), De Gaulle (Vertigo Productions), co-written by director Gabriel Le Bomin and Valérie Ranson-Enguiale, further cements the mythic status of a man who refused to accept France’s defeat, continuing the fight beyond its shores. The film follows de Gaulle (played with aplomb by Lambert Wilson) as he navigates the difficult and unpredictable political terrain of France under attack and ultimately succumbing to German forces. From April to June 1940, the débâcle of the German invasion is depicted through tense cabinet meetings as soldiers and politicians clash over how to fight, negotiate, or appease the enemy. These scenes, although often encumbered by exposition, feature fine supporting performances by Philippe Laudenbach as the future leader of collaborationist Vichy Maréchal Pétain, Olivier Gourmet as Prime Minister Paul Reynaud, and Alain Lenglet as military figure Maxime Weygand. Also adding his name to the recent cavalcade of performances as Winston Churchill is Tim Hudson, who creates an engaging and credible rapport with de Gaulle during their bilingual meetings in London. What sets this film apart from previous cinematic vehicles of the Gaullist myth and those focused on wartime strategy is its shift away from the collective nature of resistance, reflecting on both the personal and the political. Coupled with de Gaulle’s military manoeuvring is the story of his family’s hazardous flight from France in order to join him in London. The opening scenes depict de Gaulle as a man of faith, a loving husband to Yvonne (Isabelle Carré), and a devoted father to three children, the youngest of whom has Down syndrome. De Gaulle’s daughter Anne (Clémence Hittin) serves as a symbol of the vulnerability and dependency of France at that time. The film does little to engage with Anne’s own perspective, instead using the camera to ‘look at’ rather than ‘look with’ her. The frequent resort to creating tension when Anne wanders off only to be found a few minutes later by her panicked mother seems insincere. Nonetheless, the tenderness with which her parents, siblings, and nurse care for her is sensitively portrayed and adds an engaging layer to the film. 58 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

The depiction of de Gaulle’s family is the stronger of the two narrative threads. Scenes of German soldiers overrunning the French countryside with reckless abandon create a sense of unease during the family’s exodus. Drunken soldiers looking at and mocking family photos alludes to Jacques Audiard’s Un héros très discret (A Self-made Hero) and a dog’s corpse on the road following a German air raid attacking fleeing French citizens evokes similarly heartbreaking scenes in Clément’s Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games). The two storylines, however, feel disparate, as if one were simultaneously watching two distinct films: an arduously expositional military thriller on one hand, and an underdeveloped but promising family drama on the other.

De Gaulle further cements the mythic status of a man who refused to accept France’s defeat This dissonance is further emphasised by the film’s structure and rhythm, which suffer from the inclusion of two dramatic climaxes: a famous speech and the family’s reunion. De Gaulle’s speech, known as l’appel or ‘the call’, was broadcast by the BBC on 18 June 1940. Although one could challenge the immediate impact of this speech – few French citizens actually heard it – its symbolic significance is still celebrated to this day. A quote (‘the flame of the Resistance will never extinguish’) is engraved on the National Resistance Monument at Mont-Valérien just outside Paris where, each year on June 18, the French leader presides over a ceremony honouring de Gaulle’s famous call to arms. This act is considered the moment when he established himself as the leader of the Free French Forces. The family reunion, therefore, however gratifying, seems out of place. De Gaulle had a brief release in French cinemas in 2020 to coincide with both the eightieth anniversary of the famous appel and the fiftieth anniversary of his death. The French State had declared 2020 ‘the year of de Gaulle’. Le Bomin’s history of de Gaulle is one tailored to a definitive moment in time to present a man unblemished by his later dealings with decolonisation, a man who made the ‘right’ decision according to modern standards. The film attempts to foster a broad sense of national pride; the scene in which de Gaulle forlornly strokes France within a map of Europe on the wall of a BBC corridor is particularly mawkish. This self-aware glorification burdens the film with stilted dialogue and heavy-handed moralistic lessons for contemporary audiences. The Nazi occupation of France from 1940 to 1944 is a period known as les années noires (or the dark years). On the wall of Charles de Gaulle’s lodgings in London hangs a copy of Van Gogh’s Starry Night. With De Gaulle, Le Bomin offers a shining beacon of hope with his central figure, played with impressive sensitivity and strength by Wilson. It is an admirable performance in an otherwise unremarkable history-lesson-cum-family-drama. g Lisa Harper Campbell is an actor, writer, and academic. She obtained her doctorate in French Cinema from the University of Adelaide in 2017 and has since lectured in drama, French, and screen studies at various universities. ❖

Film

A rigged game

Hollywood’s long history of misogyny Felicity Chaplin

Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film by Helen O’Hara

Robinson $32.99 pb, 354 pp

n recent years, Hollywood has been forced to take a long hard look at itself. Since Alyssa Milano popularised the hashtag #MeToo in 2017, and the Time’s Up movement was launched in 2018, women in the film industry have been sharing their stories of sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Film critic Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood is not the first attempt at a revisionist history of the Hollywood film industry. Several books have appeared that reread Hollywood through a feminist lens: Laura L.S. Bauer’s Hollywood Heroines: The most influential women in film history (2018), Jill Tietjen and Barbara Bridges’ Hollywood: Her story, an illustrated history of women and the movies (2019), and Naomi McDougall Jones’s The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside our revolution to dismantle the gods of Hollywood (2020). They share the view, as O’Hara’s opening observation puts it, that ‘the Hollywood dream has not been open to everyone and, with a large majority of roles and senior jobs going to men, its scales have often been tilted against women’. Hollywood is – or has been for a long time – a ‘rigged game’. Women have been active in Hollywood from the beginning, and O’Hara recognises that early Hollywood was very ‘women friendly’. By the 1930s, however, women were already being ‘written out of film history’. This began with the studio system, which had its heyday from the 1920s to the 1940s, when female directors and executives ‘were replaced with female-friendly directors and executives’. The studio system also saw a rise in incidents of sexual harassment and assault as well as forced abortions for women who wanted to secure roles. These were largely facilitated by the economic rationalism of the studio system, which, intentionally or not, favoured men. Women stars were often forced into the role of ingenue or ‘love interest’ and had their contracts suspended if they bucked the system. The situation was worse for women of colour. Nonetheless, some women resisted; particularly those actresses and directors who had enough visibility to shake the system. The book is full of such stories: women standing their ground for better contracts (Olivia de Havilland) or using their suspensions to study the art of directing or editing (Ida Lupino), all of which helped inspire women to persevere in the industry. O'Hara also offers a compendium of neglected films directed by women for the reader to discover or to rediscover with a new appreciation. Women vs Hollywood rightly rejects the inherently patriarchal claims that women neither were good enough nor wanted to

succeed as much as men did. Hollywood, she says, ‘shut them out’, sometimes deliberately. The burden of this book is to show when, how, and why this intentional or ‘conscious’ suppression took place. When? The end of the silent era. During the studio system that followed, women played a less prominent role; until the 1970s, almost all executive positions at major studios were filled by men. How and why this happened is more complicated. It was, according to O’Hara, a situation not so much ‘engineered’ by men as ‘born of patriarchy’. Men may not be strictly to blame, but they certainly benefited from it. O’Hara points to systemic issues, unconscious bias, and the prevailing idea that women’s stories were deemed less important or interesting than men’s. The book moves in a broad sweep, taking in 125 years of cinema. It is not, however, just a history of women working (or not) in cinema; it is, more importantly, a critique of Hollywood as an institution and certain ancillary structures and discourses that have been hostile to women. O’Hara considers women pioneers of cinema such as Alice Guy and Lois Weber, the male-dominated studio system, the Hays Code, auteur theory, the ‘extremely male’ New Hollywood, feminist film theory and the male gaze, ‘the movie brats [who] became the grand old men of cinema’, the franchise and blockbuster phenomenon, the #MeToo movement and gender pay gap, and the ‘industry’s gatekeepers’ (festivals, critics, and awards bodies). O’Hara writes in a lively, journalistic style filled with quips and puns and irreverent digs, but with a commitment to her serious subject matter. There is a narrative logic that holds the reader’s interest. O’Hara uses contemporary analogies to give the reader with little knowledge of early Hollywood reference points (think of Chris Hemsworth if you don’t know Douglas Fairbanks) and draws parallels between eras to establish continuity (the ‘casting couch’ of Joan Crawford’s day prefigures the Weinstein affair). To ground her argument, she also draws on film historians, academics, and interviews with women directors. At times, O’Hara engages in speculation and shies away from analysis in favour of statistics and anecdotes. However disheartening, these are interesting and enlightening. She makes no secret that this book is a polemic, and a traditional feminist polemic threatens to run aground on the rocks of intersectionality. O’Hara is more than aware of this; indeed, it soon becomes clear that the word ‘women’ is really a metonym for the Hollywood subaltern (women, yes, but also, non-white, trans, disabled, and LGBTIQ+) and that the word ‘Hollywood’ stands in for the white, cis, able-bodied, hetero male. Overall, O’Hara is optimistic about the future of Hollywood, proposing ‘a new New Hollywood, one that actually opens its doors to diverse voices’. While this review was being written, the Oscars were announced. For only the second time in history, a woman, Chloé Zhao, received the Best Director Award for Nomadland. If, as O’Hara concludes, Hollywood is ‘on the brink of change’, this just may be a sign that this change has arrived. g Felicity Chaplin teaches in the European Languages program at Monash University. She is the author of two books, Charlotte Gainsbourg: Transnational and transmedia stardom (Manchester University Press, 2020) and La Parisienne in Cinema: Between art and life (Manchester University Press, 2017). AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Theatre

The snares of history Joanna Murray-Smith’s new play Andrew Fuhrmann

erlin, by Joanna Murray-Smith, is an intense, very wordy, imperfectly plotted, but nonetheless stylish play. ‘Stylish’ is a strange word to describe a play about young love sabotaged by tragic secrets and the legacy of the Holocaust. Shouldn’t it also be ‘heart-breaking’, ‘harrowing’, or at least ‘poignant’? Perhaps, but ‘stylish’ is the right word for a play – a thriller, in fact – that is also a swiftly argued essay on the difficulties faced by sensitive and ethical individuals who want to free themselves from the snares of history to make a new future. Here, as in earlier works, Murray-Smith frets her text with the glitter of a cool cosmopolitanism. The dialogue swerves – credibly enough – from the politics of contemporary art to an eloquent commentary on public monuments, from the poetry of Emily Dickinson to the repatriation of colonial-era artefacts. It’s the sort of play where retro chic punk music sits comfortably next to a spine-tingling string quartet. And there are plenty of witty snapshot observations – mostly sardonic in tone – of life in contemporary Berlin, with its tourists and artists and hipsters and migrants. Tom is a twenty-something backpacker who has just arrived in Berlin. He meets a local woman called Charlotte in a bar under a train station. He gives her a line about needing somewhere to stay, and she invites him back to her place. It’s past midnight by the time they reach the swanky inner-city loft space in Prenzlauer Berg, where Charlotte lives by herself. They talk and drink and talk some more. Soon, their flirtation becomes an involved discussion about blame, forgiveness, and the difference between guilt and responsibility. This debate seems to get them both pretty excited, and they agree that this might be the real thing. There might be a hitch, however: it eventually emerges that Tom is Jewish. In fact, his great-grandfather lived on Drakestrasse in Berlin in a large house full of antiquities and paintings by the likes of Picasso and Chagall. He was, of course, murdered by the Nazis. Suddenly, the presence in Charlotte’s apartment of a large painting of a stormy sky by John Constable – a huge canvas that dominates the set – begins to make more sense. At the same time, some of Tom’s banter can seem rather sinister. Charlotte, however, is too swept up in the moment to notice. She recites a poem by Rilke, and they go to bed. Charlotte, played with much subtlety and craft by Grace Cummings, is a poet, a waitress, and a trust-fund baby. She feels out of place in modern Germany: she abhors the extreme right but nonetheless has a strong patriotic streak, which puts her at odds with her contemporaries on the left. She insists that she understands the enormity of the Nazi atrocities – and admits that they need to be remembered – but she also feels that her country has languished too long in a hole of moral responsibility. Anxiety about the crimes of the past, she believes, is distorting the way in which Germans see the problems of the present. The next morning, while making juice and coffee, Charlotte expatiates on this desire for her compatriots to let go of their guilt 60 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

and belong more fully to the now. Challenged by Tom, who can scarcely believe his ears, she begins criticising what she thinks of as Jewish victimhood. This is where Cummings is particularly good, managing to seem both astonished at the crassness of her own words but also defiant and unwilling to back down. It’s some sort of achievement that she remains a sympathetic character throughout the play. Tom, on the other hand, played by Michael Wahr, is less sympathetic, despite his more orthodox politics. Early on, he proposes a theory, claiming that we are all unconsciously driven to fix the mistakes and more serious calamities of our past. Charlotte’s brother was killed in a car accident. Now, says Tom, she is compelled to save young men. That’s why she so readily invited him, a complete stranger, into her home. For Tom, however, the compulsion is restitution: he wants to repair the breakup of his great-grandfather’s home by retrieving the stolen art. Why he resorts to burglary rather than going through the official channels is not explained.

It’s the sort of play where retro chic punk music sits comfortably next to a spine-tingling string quartet Director Iain Sinclair has played down the physicality of Tom and Charlotte’s mutual attraction, giving their flirtation a graceful but almost funereal tone. This sombre mood is exaggerated by the heavy, tomb-like quality of Christina Smith’s set and Niklas Pajanti’s shadowy lighting. In the memorable scene when Tom gets out of bed to check his phone, he is caught in a shaft of greenish-blue light from the side of the stage. At that moment he looks like a corpse rising from the earth, clambering back into the present. For all its pared-back stylishness, however, Berlin is a strange play. The story of a law school drop-out turned international art thief and a waitress with a $5 million painting hanging over her bed is a flimsy one. Why wasn’t more care taken with this potentially gripping plot? There are scenes – such as the almost farcical denouement – when the lack of plausibility feels like a wilful act of authorial disavowal. It is possible to imagine this play as a longer and more considered statement, with more detail and dramatic nuance. This production, which is only eighty minutes long, feels rushed. There also need to be more moments for reflection, moments when the quipping and the debating stop. The audience should be given a chance to think for themselves, for Joanna Murray-Smith’s theme is one with considerable purchase on contemporary debates about memory and history in Australia and other countries around the world. g Berlin (Melbourne Theatre Company) was presented in April– May 2021. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Andrew Fuhrmann reviews books and theatre. He was an ABR Ian Potter Foundation Fellow in 2013 and is currently writing a book on the plays of Patrick White.

Art

Foundational myths

NGV paves the way for future breakaways A. Frances Johnson

have frequented too often the gift shops of Australian Impressionism. Back in 1985, I mooned over David Davies’ Templestowe twilight scene before purchasing the corresponding tea towel (for my mum), Fire’s On placemats with matching coasters (for my dad), and lost child mugs (for my siblings, only one of whom took offence).We lived equidistant from Eaglemont and Warrandyte, sacred artist sites both. In our loungeroom, a print of Tom Roberts’s herculean Shearing the Rams hung above the recliners, a russet-toned paean to heroic masculine rural labour, divested of grime and abjection. None of us had ever come close to sheep or shearer, though we vaguely understood the sheep’s back as a metaphor of economic prosperity. My mother eventually removed the print to the hard rubbish, after decades of blasting western sun faded it to a fleecy moonrise. In a house with few books, weighty Impressionist catalogues became the fifth leg of the coffee table, largely unread but too good to use as doorstops. Looking at a tower of older catalogues before me today, I can shallowly report that the box-office smash that was Golden Summers: Heidelberg and Beyond ( Jane Clark and Bridget Whitelaw, National Gallery of Victoria, 1985) had a catalogue of modest heft compared to Terence Lane’s whopping Australian Impressionism (Australian National Gallery, 2007) and Anne Gray’s sizeable, magisterial Tom Roberts (NGA, 2018). What sticks in my mind is Victoria Hammond and Juliet Peers’s 1992–93 touring exhibition Completing the Picture: Women Artists and the Heidelberg Era (Heide Art Gallery and other venues). I remember standing gobsmacked before monumental Sargeantish interiors by Violet Teague (Dian Dreams [Una Falkiner] [1909]) and Alice Bale (Leisure Moments [1902] and Interior [Morning Papers] [c.1913]), feeling that until that point I’d been cheated of something important. The 1980s and 1990s were a watershed time for scholars, curators, and artists to rethink the mythic cultural baggage that had accreted around the so-called Heidelberg School and Australian painting generally. Ann Galbally, Leigh Astbury, Janine Burke, Frances Lindsay, Hammond and Peers, David Hansen, and artists such as Julie Brown-Rrap, Joan Ross, Stephen Bush, Gordon Bennett, and Anne Zahalka variously added significant feminist, postcolonial, and biographical freight to twentieth-century hagiographies of landscape privileging masculine enchantments with rural labour and sentimentalised scenes of settler struggle. Astbury wrote in City Bushmen (1985) that popular interpretations of the Heidelberg era – whereby a group of rebels (rejecting academic tradition embodied by Eugene von Guérard, Nicholas Chevalier and others) became the ‘discoverers’ of a new Australian painting reflecting a golden age of national idealism – were given impetus by the upsurge of nationalistic feeling during and after World War I. This, he argues, has coloured nearly all accounts of the period. In the catalogue of the famed Golden Summers exhibition, Galbally bravely struck at the heart of local cultural myth, point-

ing out that academically trained artists in Brittany, Cornwall, Melbourne, Sydney and elsewhere were variously producing luminous, anti-urban naturalist painting. She notes that following World War I, ‘writers were tempted to … see the decades of the 1880s and 1890s as a golden age – a time of pure unsullied Australian nationalism’. Lionel Lindsay and Arthur Streeton, keen to look back from post-Federation vantage points, idealised the complications they’d lived through. The resultant typecasting, Galbally concludes, dominated ‘all aesthetic and historical discussion of the period until the 1970s’. But those queueing for Golden Summers wanted to be welcomed to the gift shop – to take pleasure in pure paint but also to buy into foundational myths of Australian painting. Not for nothing did cartoonist Michael Leunig create his parodic Ramming the Shears (1985), attempting to awaken modern settlers from a golden-summered stupor. Bicentennial ‘celebrations’ loomed; artists began reconsidering landscapes bereft of women and Indigenous protagonists. The above critiques contribute significant bedrock to the NGV’s beautifully researched new exhibition, She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, curated by Anne Gray, former head of Australian Art, National Gallery of Australia, and an NGV team led by Dr Angela Hessen, Curator of Australian Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Named for a sensuous lozenge of a landscape by Tom Roberts (1889), the show elegantly situates the variegated local and European, social and artistic, influences that impacted the evolution of so-called Australian Impressionism, foregrounding urban subject matters and portrait genres alongside landscape. Whisperings of bohemian queerness and nascent suffragism, popular colonial illustration and high colonial landscape art, imported Whistlerian aestheticism, photography, and Barbizon school naturalism are shown as part of a mosaic of influence across boom and depression years, and shifting sands in relation to the enfranchisement of women and Indigenous peoples. To wit, wall texts particularise the First Nations country where settler work was made, a respectful strategy that invites viewers to contest the dispossessing and proleptic assumptions underpinning settler landscape and portrait practices. The catalogue chronology also movingly situates Indigenous and suffragist political gains and losses alongside key biographical information. Roberts and Artur Loureiro painted portraits of Indigenous men, though only Loureiro’s King Barak last of the Yarra Tribe (1900) appears here, with limited contextualisation. As Hannah Presley, NGV curator of Indigenous Art, writes with Sophie Gerhard: ‘the general invisibility of Aboriginal people helped to erase the less appealing aspects of colonial expansion from Australia’s burgeoning national narrative’. The informative texts also recalibrate Australian landscape’s central cultural imaginaries as they pertain to the Heidelberg School.1 The ‘Heidelberg School’ nametag, for starters, is rescinded. As Gray asserts, there was no school. McCubbin never painted in Heidelberg or Eaglemont, though he socialised there; and in the 1880s and, particularly, the 1890s, Roberts, Streeton, and Charles Conder worked extensively in Sydney. Certain women painters daytripped to Melbourne’s artist camps as propriety decreed. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

The exhibition mostly unfolds as a lucid intellectual and pictorial fugue, though the catalogue offers political and historical riches that certain sections of the exhibition sometimes struggle to articulate. Viewers are nonetheless diligently reminded that the artists and writers of the time were not stuck in mythic golden age cultural aspic, that gilded frames came later, idealising decades lived in multicultural cities bursting from their bricked sides. Although several artists came from affluent professional backgrounds, Roberts, Jane Price and others struggled as jobbing artists. Roberts’s painter friend Louis Abrahams suicided, though we know not why. Another friend of Roberts, Eileen Tooker, the subject of his sensitive, melancholy portrait Eileen (1892), left her husband and children in Queensland. Again, we don’t know why, but her net veil suddenly suggests an ambiguous cover over bruised skin tone. Gray notes in her rich historical overview, ‘Friends and Rivals: A Quartet with Variations’, that Roberts and Streeton escaped Melbourne’s economic depression in Sydney; Roberts had no family support and, for all his magnanimous encouragement of women painters and young artists, no secure teaching work. He couldn’t marry his love, recognised carver and gilder Elizabeth ‘Lillie’ Wilkinson, until the age of forty, after notching up sales from the nascent Art Gallery of New South Wales and securing society portrait commissions. The impressive catalogue features insightful essays by Gray and Hessen but also Mary Ann Stevens, Galbally, Presley, Gerhard, Elizabeth Kertesz, and Helen Ennis. Hessen navigates a panoply of local and international cultural influences, also reflecting how professional women artists risked misogynistic Ruskinian stoning by conservative critics for works designated sketchy or undisciplined, though this does not entirely explain why no professional women artists were included in the 1889 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition. Stevens is particularly acute at helping us understand the differences between French Impressionism and Australian Impressionism, though women are largely away beekeeping and doing the laundry in her otherwise deft comparative. Presley and Gerhard usher in important postcolonial Indigenous historical perspectives on Australian late nineteenth-century cultures, arguing that the ‘ingrained’ and ‘persistent’ idea that Australian painting was the invention of the Heidelberg School overlooks the thriving and dynamic art traditions of Australia’s First Peoples, whose diverse visual expressions over millennia recorded and continue to record language, cosmology, lore, identity, and particularities of country. So how do ideas put forward in the catalogue translate as display? An immediate success of this show is its beguiling evocation of the 9 x 5 Impression Exhibition (1889). Most works were painted on wooden cigar-box lids. Around forty-five appear out of the original one hundred and eighty-odd works. An intimate salon on rich burgundy walls evokes the old and is a chance to view works rarely seen in concert, including Conder’s Going Home (The Grey and the Gold), Dusk, and other Whistlerian beauties, such as Roberts’s The Violin Lesson. I wonder if, one day, a similar reconstruction might interweave or mirror the small sketches and impressions made by those women artists who worked alongside Roberts at Grosvenor Chambers. Elsewhere, one can map Conder’s artistic journey from 62 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

light-suffused naturalism to bold aesthetic abstraction. His pastorale While Daylight Lingers (c.1890) counterpoints Price’s bleached Plough Land in Summer (c.1900), just as his sun-blasted timber-splitters counterpoint Streeton’s paled take on timber-getting. These works, often interesting from current environmental perspectives, suggest settler struggles with a country little understood beyond extractive paradigms. But other core-of-my-heart images inevitably return us to deep-seated, mistaken settler beliefs that nature’s bounty was there for the taking, existing in perpetuity. Streeton’s prettified vista of rampant gorse weed, Early Summer – Gorse in Bloom (1888), is a case in point, where even introduced weeds are subjects for visual poesy. His largescale arcadias are always blank, luminous illusions of peacefully conquered place. The exhibition also foregrounds lesser-known professional women artists, building on their modest inclusions in Golden Summers (NGV, 1985), notwithstanding Hammond and Peers’s detailed revisionist corrective of 1992. We are introduced to Ina Gregory, Iso Rae and others, alongside the usual drawcards of the Janes (Sutherland and Price) and Clara Southern. Luminosity, gesturally made, is both theme and moody affect across pastoral works such as Sutherland’s Field Naturalists (c.1896), Price’s Plough Land in Summer (c.1900), and Southern’s An Old Bee Farm (c.1900). Southern’s painting suggests, in Hessen’s words, ‘a Romantic wistfulness for a kind of landscape, and a relationship with it, that modernity made vulnerable’. These elegiac works hint at the erosion of rural life through industrialisation. Melbourne’s electric streetlights were switched on in 1894, but women were barred from the newly founded Savage Club, a space for men to speak of culture. Southern, however, attended the cultural debates at Young and Jackson’s Buonarroti Club, at Roberts’s invitation. Meanwhile, the women’s late-summer, crepuscular twilight scenes stand tall by those of Conder, E. Phillips Fox, Loureiro, and Davies. Southern, in particular, shines. Lyrical atmospheres cloak unmacho images of work: beekeeping, bug-catching, ploughing ruts. Women artists were scratching a living, but while Streeton and Roberts charged up to two hundred guineas for their works, Sutherland’s commanded a mere twenty pounds. Valiantly, these professionally trained women painters pressed on, agitating for improved pay and enfranchisement. Phillips Fox’s remarkable painting Art Students (1895), exhibited here, is a tribute to women painters’ work well before the vote was secured in 1908. Iso Rae’s monumental, electric-toned portrait Young Girl, Etaples (c.1892), acquired by the NGV in 2020, will not disappoint. The unusually high horizon line, abstracted composition, and bold splashes of overhead light enchant. Rae’s high-key green and pink chromatics offer something entirely different from Sutherland and Price. Rae worked for decades alongside French-influenced Impressionist artists in northern Brittany (including John Russell) and was one of the first Australian artists to be collected in France. While the ‘She’ appears substantively returned to the ‘Oak’, this has not been a given in millennial accounts of local Impressionism – witness the NGA’s 2016–17 export show of rural and urban landscapes to London’s National Gallery, Australia’s

Impressionists, which, embarrassingly, included no women. Russell is described by Tim Bonyhady in said catalogue as ‘the odd man out’ alongside Conder, Roberts, and Streeton. If only Southern, Rae, or Teague had been even that. This exhibition, therefore, makes important revisionist strides. But given its emphasis on the academic training and cross-genre practices, it seems a strenuous omission that the aforementioned best-practice works by Bale, Teague, Vale, and Muntz Adams are not included to counterpoint Roberts’s brilliant squarebrushed portraits. Were their works, located in public galleries, thought too academic? If so, why? A small, scrappy self-portrait by Teague (1899) is hung; we pass by Tudor St George Tucker’s cheesy backlit female portraits and an avalanche of Streeton’s prurient late works of An old bee farm, c.1900, by Clara Southern (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1942) mythological goddesses. (Look! No faces! It’s the aesthetic movement!) The above omissions shape a powerful narrative of male and politically imaginative ways, nodding to the future. Imagine skill against the best intentions of this show. It’s an enduring The Pioneer set alongside Anne Zahalka’s McCubbinesque parody joy that Roberts cleaved to the restrained compositional grav- The Immigrants No. 2 (1985), or A Break Away! set alongside Bigitas of Courbet, and less so to the lambent-eyed rural subjects ambul woman Leah King-Smith’s Patterns of Connection (1991). The masterstroke of this scholarly exhibition is to construct of French Naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage (see McCubbin’s sentimental theatres, staged on gorgeous, loose-painted vistas). a complex narrative with faith that viewers, as they proceed, will For that reason, I can’t get enough of Robert’s paintings. I have let go of time-honoured, simplistic mythologies of golden-age felt a similar rush on seeing Teague’s and Bale’s masterworks. In Australian art. Familiar, lushly painted works are, for the most 1920, Ethel Carrick and Rupert Bunny warmly congratulated part, gently reangled for new, future-looking conversations about Teague on her 1911 painting The Boy with the Palette, hung at Australian identity and culture, paving the way for bold and coveted eyeline level at the Salon des Artistes Francais.2 It doesn’t inclusive pictorial ‘break aways’ to come. g help that this catalogue opens with eleven full-page (in some instances double-page) reproductions of iconic works by male 1 See Bernard Smith’s chapter on the birth of Australian paintpainters, including Leon Pole (yes, Pole). The last key room of the ing, triumphally titled ‘Genesis’. This took as the epic beginning exhibition follows gendered suit. I’m not sure what message this of Australian art the year 1885, marking Roberts’s return from gives young women with palettes – still dominating art school Europe (Place, Taste and Tradition, 1945). enrolments, as they did in the 1890s. It is surely not that hard to 2 ‘Hooray your boy with the palette has been awarded a silver medal,’ wrote Carrick. Bunny wrote from Paris: ‘It really stands bring these things into balance. The exhibition’s finale, described by the curators as the ‘Aus- out to me as one of the best things there.’ (Hammond and tralian Narratives room’, displays Wurundjeri Head Man and Peers, p. 74). artist William Barak’s ceremonial watercolours against iconic works, including McCubbin’s epic The Pioneer (1904), Roberts’s She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism continues at the A Break Away! (1891) and Shearing the Rams (1890), and Stree- NGV until 22 August 2021. This review is supported by the ton’s Fire’s On (1891). It’s a risky (or insufficiently risky) post- Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. colonial strategy. From disjuncture, counter-narratives of foundational Australian cultural identity supposedly flow, or at least A. Frances Johnson’s fourth poetry collection, Save As, will be healthily jostle. Here, the intercultural dance is briefly elegant, published in 2021 by Puncher and Wattmann. A novel, Eugene’s but white scale overwhelms. I can’t help wondering why, given Falls (Arcadia 2007), retraces the painter Eugene von Guerard’s that the opening room is presented as ‘precursors’, ‘successors’ journeys across Taungurong country. She is Associate Professor might not have been displayed alongside settler and Indigenous of Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne and was the art of the period. This might have shaken things up in visually winner of the 2020 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Art

‘The sun is still shining’

(until 11 July). Both the book and the exhibition admirably explain the international origins of, and the processes involved in, this mass-circulation image production. Bringing A.H. Fullwood into the light Fullwood paints blossoming orchards en plein air near the Jane Clark Hawkesbury at Richmond with Julian Ashton and the precociously accomplished Charles Conder. He is a friend and close colleague of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton when both move north from Melbourne in the early 1890s. He joins the bohemian Curlew Camp at Little Sirius Cove, and exhibits watercolours Picturing a Nation: The art and life and oils with some success. Regrettably, many of his paintings of A.H. Fullwood are now untraced, but, to judge from contemporary reviews and by Gary Werskey the surviving works, he doesn’t appear to have achieved anything approaching the magisterial large-scale figure in action of RobNewSouth erts’s A break away! or the colour, drama, and bravura brushwork $49.99 hb, 416 pp of Streeton’s Fire’s On and ‘The purple noon’s transparent might’, ar too few Australian artists have been the subject of com- which all have such timeless appeal. Werskey’s exposition of the prehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Hum- rather toxic art politics of 1890s Sydney (continued later among phrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an in- the expatriate community in London) is fascinating. spiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective Fullwood was a self-proclaimed ‘bully optimist’ – ‘I feel the exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seven- sun is still shining somewhere’ – but was always in financial ty-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Wer- straits. His impoverished father had died of cirrhosis of the liver skey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a Nation, set in rich his- in 1883. His widowed mother, Emma, died in 1895 at sixty-three: torical and social context, is most welcome. As he observes, A.H. a boarding-house servant very unlikely to be the flaming redhead Fullwood’s life was ‘as full of pathos and plot turns as a three- portrayed in Fullwood’s beautiful Dolce far Niente of 1896 (as volume Victorian novel’. Werskey curiously suggests). We meet English-born Albert Henry, called Jack by his Perhaps that young woman is Clyda Newman, whom family, arriving in Sydney from Birmingham late in 1883 and be- Fullwood married in 1896 but whose subsequent life was utcoming the talented and genial terly tragic. In 1900, with no storytelling ‘Uncle Remus’ to his confirmed employment, he many Australian artist friends. took her, their two-year-old, The nickname probably comes and their infant of six months from his close association with to New York to live on a farm the imported team of American more than thirty miles out of black-and-white graphic artists town and then on to London and engravers working on the the next year. Within months, Picturesque Atlas of Australasia: Clyda, pregnant again, was produced in forty-two parts committed to Bethlem Hosbetween 1886 and 1889 and pital. Inexplicably, Fullwood offering a proud ‘centennial’ took off on a twelve-week trip celebration of settler-colonial to South Africa, followed by a Australian history, achievespell in Windsor with Streeton. ments, and prospects. FullThe baby died. Their eldest son wood’s key role in the shaping died of meningitis at thirteen. of settler-Australia’s self-image, Clyda suffered fifteen years in ‘picturing a nation’ to the world a series of asylums before she through newspapers, magazines, died in 1918, a ‘pauper lunatic’, and postcards – feeding an while Fullwood was in France ‘image consumption’ arguably as an official Australian war as influential as today’s social artist. Werskey’s painstakingly media – becomes even clearer researched and deeply empain the exhibition currently at the thetic account of this family’s National Library of Australia, dissolution is also important A Nation Imagined: The Artists for understanding the lives of the Picturesque Atlas, which of so many other dependent is curated by Werskey with women and their children in Natalie Wilson from the Art those days. (More happily, and Prince Regent’s Glen, Wentworth Falls, 1888 Gallery of New South Wales equally interesting as social (Macquarie University Art Gallery: Denis Savill Collection)

64 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

history, Fullwood’s close female companion from around 1905, Frances Prudence, was clearly an adventurous and independent single mother.) Like Streeton, George Lambert, and others, honorary lieutenant Fullwood was energised by his time on the Somme battlefields and behind the lines, writing later that ‘modern war, for all its horrible features, was magnificent pictorially’. Although the Australian War Memorial holds his two large war paintings in oil, the scheme’s administrators in London felt that his strength lay in capturing details of soldiering that were best suited to the small scale of watercolours and drawings. Werskey quotes Richard Holmes, that master biographer, on the ‘idea of finding a central but relatively neutral or unfamiliar figure to tell the story of a famous group or circle’. Holmes continues, ‘The difficulty is that the “neutral” figure usually becomes of absorbing interest in his or her own right’ – as Fullwood certainly does in Werskey’s hands. The other difficulty is the temptation to claim for that unfamiliar character too much influence in the ‘famous group or circle’, and to be combative about why he or she is less celebrated than others. Bringing someone in from the cold doesn’t mean pushing aside or discounting those already around the heater. My one disappointment with Picturing a Nation is the confusing lack of clarity in the use of art-historical ‘labels’. Quite correctly, Werskey writes that Fullwood ‘was highly regarded by critics and peers alike as an important contributor to the movement of “Australian Impressionism”’. He says that there is continuing debate about what’s meant by the term Australian Impressionism but also ‘current consensus among scholars’ (unfortunately there’s no bibliography). Fullwood is said to have had ‘his own brand of tonal “Impressionism”’ across all the media in which he worked; to have shared Roberts’s and Streeton’s ‘“tonal realist” style and plein-air preferences’ and to have ‘cemented his relationship with Roberts and Streeton [in Sydney] at the zenith of their Heidelberg moment’. ‘Roberts’s Heidelberg’, the ‘fabled era’, and ‘the Heidelberg era’ all figure, but the origin of the now sometimes contested term ‘the Heidelberg School’ is not mentioned. Nor is John Russell, who worked with Claude Monet and whose letters from France about Impressionism Roberts showed to Streeton (and surely also to friend Remus?). Both Fullwood and Russell returned to Sydney from overseas in the 1920s and died there in 1930. To quote Holmes again, biographers can never quite catch their subject’s fleeting figure, but Werskey’s pursuit still brings Fullwood vividly to life. He was obviously well liked, in part because he wasn’t pushy. Was he simply too poor, despite periodic successes, to maintain any substantial presence in the art world? As an ‘English/British, Australian/colonial/imperial artist’, was he too many things to be singular? Did he drink too much perhaps? We know he consulted fortune tellers. I owe Fullwood an apology. Way back in 1985, selecting loans for the nationally touring exhibition Golden Summers: Heidelberg and beyond (we deliberately avoided the term ‘Australian Impressionism’, though we knew the power of its brand), we were unable to borrow his lovely Early Spring near Richmond, NSW, then in England, nor the charming Hop Pickers, New Norfolk, Tasmania (1893), which is still in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. We therefore represented him with

Sturt Street, Ballarat, the black-and-white illustration Werskey calls his ‘most acclaimed contribution to the Atlas’. I knew his nineteenth-century reputation called for more. And he deserves more now than the single painting in the National Gallery of Victoria’s She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism (until 22 August). I hope that Gary Werskey’s efforts, and a planned retrospective at Macquarie University in November, bring more of his missing pictures to light. g Jane Clark, a former Curator of Major Special Exhibitions and of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria, now Senior Research Curator at Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart. Streaming

Knotty traumas

A sophisticated depiction of mental illness Jordan Prosser

poiler alert: at the end of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Randle Patrick McMurphy is lobotomised. It’s a tragic defeat for a counter-culture hero and a barbaric victory for the institution housing him. The psychiatric facility is depicted as a prison, its residents the doomed inmates, and its head nurse, the villainous Nurse Ratched, the warden. In that story, madness is analogous to freedom, and the final image of Chief making his escape for Canada is a much-needed glimmer of resistance and hope. Wakefield, the eponymous establishment in the ABC’s terrific new series, is worlds away from Kesey’s sterile psych ward: it’s a safe, colourful, pleasantly cluttered place, perched on an improbably majestic bluff in the Blue Mountains. The staff are flawed but dedicated caregivers, and the Nurse Ratched standin is a put-upon middle manager named Linda. The patients, or ‘clients’, are not grappling with a vicious institution – only themselves and an array of knotty traumas. At Wakefield, mental illness is not something to be hidden, suppressed, exorcised, or lobotomised. And if the distinction still weren’t clear enough, in one episode nurse Nik Katira tells a patient, ‘This isn’t One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, before escorting her to a restorative session of electro-shock therapy. Nik (brilliantly played by British actor Rudi Dharmalingam) is the star nurse in Ward C at Wakefield. Beloved by colleagues and clients alike, Nik is naturally empathetic, passionate, and hands-on: a paragon of modern mental healthcare. But as Nik vies for a promotion in order to unseat Linda (Mandy McElhinney), struggles with his feelings for head doctor and ex-fiancée Kareena (Geraldine Hakewill), helps his lonely father (Shapoor Batliwalla) get back into the dating game, rebuffs his mother’s (Nadie Kammallaweera) fanatical Christianity, prepares for his sister’s (Monica Kumar) wedding, and corrals the eccentric inhabitants of Wakefield, he might just be losing his mind. It begins with a simple earworm, a song stuck in his head: ‘Come On Eileen’ AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

by Dexys Midnight Runners (we’ve all been there). Then, images. Hallucinations. Or are they flashbacks? Snippets of childhood memories that don’t quite add up, hinting at some buried trauma. Nik’s deterioration becomes the show’s main through-line; inevitably, we will see him being pacified by his own patients. Maybe one incessant 1980s chart-topper is all that separates the lanyards from the straitjackets. Created and penned by Kristen Dunphy, with writing from Sam Meikle, Joan Sauers, and Cathy Strickland, and wonderfully directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and Kim Mordaunt, Wakefield bites off a lot – stylistically, thematically, and dramatically – and

Promotional image for Wakefield (ABC TV)

manages to chew almost all of it. Functioning as melodrama, social realism, and Lynchian dreamscape, it constructs its eight episodes as a series of overlapping vignettes, revisiting certain events from different perspectives, a neat trick that makes each encounter even richer the second or third time around. It expresses its characters’ mental states in unique and often bewitching ways: huge images projected on a retaining wall as a young woman flees through a Gothic courtyard; a naked man reclining on a single bed in a forest of blackened trees, surrendering his flesh to the wood and ash. Bizarre but brilliantly choreographed dance sequences – a coping mechanism for Nik – burst with light and energy. In fact, the entire series is gorgeously vivid. Cinematographer Martin McGrath wrings every last drop of colour from the picturesque surrounds of Wakefield, thankfully eschewing the default modern-day mystery-thriller palette of grey, blue, and more grey. Central to both style and plot is Moorhouse and Mordaunt’s handling of Nik’s intensifying flashbacks. Less creatively assured television tends to wield flashbacks as a blunt instrument, assuming that the more frequent and jarring they are, the more impactful they will be (see HBO’s woeful The Undoing). In Wakefield they are a scalpel, sudden and all the more frightening for it, expertly integrated through Gabriel Dowrick and Nicholas Holmes’ top-notch editing. Then there is the all-important 66 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

earworm. ‘Come On Eileen’ is stuck in Nik’s head for the entire series. He begins to hear it everywhere: a song at a wedding, on the radio in a change room, as a tune plucked on a patient’s guitar. The sound design finds endlessly creative and nefarious ways to weave ‘Come On Eileen’ into the aural fabric of the show; it may be the most sophisticated representation of underlying trauma in this or any other show like it. Stories about mental illness require a special synergy between writer, director, and performer, and Wakefield achieves this across the board. There is not a single crude or lacklustre turn from any member of the enormous and embarrassingly talented cast. Dan Wyllie plays Steve, the burnt-out businessman trying to close a real estate deal in London from Wakefield’s broom closet. Harry Greenwood is Trevor, the ward’s class clown, wonderfully funny and tragic in equal measure. Bessie Holland is great as Tessa, a milliner and hoarder with a fiery left hook. And Harriet Dyer and Ryan Corr are especially good as couple Genevieve and Raff, fighting to retain the memories of their relationship after Gen’s disturbing schizophrenic relapse. Then there’s Wayne Blair, Colin Friels, Kim Gyngell, Matt Nable … the list goes on. If it wasn’t clear that we were meant to laugh from time to time, Wakefield also casts notable comedians Felicity Ward and Sam Simmons as Nik’s nursing offsiders. The cast is so good and each of their stories so beautifully observed it almost makes you wish the writers had given us a full, unbroken hour with each of them, rather than sprinkling their scenes across the full run of episodes. Wakefield ’s structure is one of its most notable innovations, but also its biggest stumbling block. Torn between a traditional ‘case of the week’ set-up and a more long-form puzzle-box mystery, it does occasional disservice to both, particularly in the middle stretch of episodes when the deluge of cryptic clues about Nik’s past hits saturation point. Tap shoes, puzzle pieces, bathtubs, butterflies – we’re drip-fed these beautiful but vague sensory memories and asked to simply file them away for later. Nik is both victim and detective in his own mystery – here, Dharmalingam doesn’t miss a beat – but for a few hours his storyline feels inaccessible, and not necessarily any more compelling than Wakefield ’s other characters’ – just eight times longer. When that eighth episode arrives, though, all is forgiven. Wakefield ’s finale delivers on its many, many promises, in a near-perfect hour of solid and heartfelt payoff. It focuses all of Wakefield ’s stylistic experimentation, twisting narrative devices, and dense symbolism into a cunning and unabashedly emotional climax. If the middle stretch of this entrancing and unusual show begins to frustrate you, don’t dismay. Stick it out. There’s method to its madness. g Jordan Prosser is a Melbourne-based writer, director, and performer, and a graduate of the VCA School of Film & Television. His short films have screened at dozens of international festivals, and he has appeared on stages across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, and the United Kingdom.

Musical

‘Welcome to the Fun Home’ From graphic novel to musical Ian Dickson

Fun Home (photograph by Prudence Upton)

un Home is not your average musical. Based on Alison Bechdel’s hugely influential 2006 graphic novel of the same name – which contrasts her coming out as a lesbian with her gay father’s closeted, unhappy, and ultimately selfdestructive life – Hello, Dolly! it ain’t. But in the clear-eyed, compassionate, and understanding hands of playwright Lisa Kron and composer Jeanine Tesori, it became a multi-award-winning, much-performed success. The novel couldn’t have been taken up by a more appropriate pair. Kron has written several autobiographical monologues. In 2.5 Minute Ride, she juxtaposes a family trip to an Ohio amusement park with a journey she took with her septuagenarian father to Auschwitz, where his parents were murdered. She steers her audience through the worst moments with an unsentimental, sardonic honesty, but finds light in the darkness and manages to end on a high note both hard-earned and authentic. All of these qualities she brings to Bechdel’s story. The award-winning Tesori is one of the most versatile composers in her field. From a close collaborative relationship with Tony Kushner to Shrek The Musical, she has covered the territory. As she has said: ‘Musical theatre, which is a brilliant art form, knows no boundaries in what it can do and we really cannot condescend to it.’ Fun Home is a play that reminds us that memory doesn’t work in a neatly linear way. As the adult Alison works on her novel, different moments from her childhood and young adulthood appear in seemingly random fashion. We are presented with a young Alison, one who cannot understand the underlying tensions in the family and is only dimly aware of her ‘difference’, and a teenage Alison who has to go through the agonising rituals of accepting her sexuality and then coming out – rituals that her father, Bruce, was never able to bring himself to perform. The adult Alison is a permanent presence who becomes not so much a narrator as a commentator; her observations are prefaced by the word ‘caption’. Bruce runs the local funeral home and teaches English in

their Pennsylvanian town, but his real obsession is renovating and redecorating houses. He and his wife, Helen, attempt to convince their community and their children that they are a normal, happy family, but the underlying tensions mount and lead to the inevitable conclusion. Or is it inevitable? Alison has to face the fact that her coming out may have triggered Bruce’s final suicidal breakdown. All of this sounds relentlessly grim, but the miracle of Fun Home is how much joy and humour it manages to find in this story. Once again, the Sydney Theatre Company has pulled out all stops and put together a remarkable team of cast and creatives. Director Dean Bryant and musical director Carmel Dean are in complete control of Kron and Tesori’s complex, challenging work. We are always aware of where we are in the intricately shifting time scheme. Designer Alicia Clements moves seamlessly from the over-cluttered family home to a bleak New York apartment. Only in a pivotal scene in a diner is it not made completely clear where we are supposed to be. The three Alisons are nicely contrasted. Lucy Maunder’s adult version, looking more like the American political commentator and gay icon Rachel Maddow than the actual Bechdel, uses dry humour to try to distance herself from her past, but finds herself drawn into it. In the scene in which she usurps the place of her teenage self, taking a last car ride with her father, she is extremely moving. Maggie McKenna’s teenage version is heartbreakingly funny and vulnerable. She makes the number ‘I’m Changing My Major’, sung after her first sexual encounter, into an explosion of jubilation and liberation. Mia Honeysett, opening night’s young Alison, is an energetic mixture of determination and confusion. She tackles her big number, ‘Ring of Keys’, which deals with her reaction to her first sighting of an out butch lesbian, with a glorious blend of wonder and identification. It is a pity, though, that, for whatever reason, in ‘Welcome to the Fun Home’, the cod advertisement for the funeral parlour that the kids dream up, a lot of Kron’s clever lyrics were lost. Adam Murphy’s Bruce covers his underlying insecurity and despair with a brittle vanity and sense of superiority. In a telling scene, he encourages young Alison to draw but then rejects her work as not artistic enough. He genuinely wants the best for his daughter, but it has to be his idea of best, not hers. Murphy gets the conflicting aspects of his character and builds to a volcanic final breakdown. It might seem that at first Marina Prior is somewhat underused as Helen, but she becomes more prominent as the play progresses. Her bitter revelation to her astounded daughter of Bruce’s gayness cuts deep. But she really comes into her own with the desolating ‘Days and Days’, in which she sums up her wasted life. It ends with the bleak advice to her daughter: ‘Don’t you come back here / I didn’t raise you / to give away your days / like me.’ Fun Home takes an unhappy story but somehow manages to turn it into a celebration of the human spirit. STC has done it proud. g Fun Home (Sydney Theatre Company) was presented in April– May 2021. This review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. Ian Dickson is ABR’s Sydney theatre critic. AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE 2021

Poetry

From the Archive

Gwen Harwood (1920–95), though not prolific at first, became one of Australia’s most celebrated poets. In the early years she was also one of its most notorious writers because of her penchant for hoaxes, often aimed at unsuspecting editors (the subject of Ann-Marie Priest’s article on page 49). To complement this feature we revisit Stephanie Trigg’s article from August 1992 in which she drew on Jacqueline Rose’s book The Haunting of Sylvia Plath to examine her own relationship with the slippery, playful, ‘oblique’ Harwood (Trigg was then writing a monograph for OUP; it appeared in 1994). Her article is one of thousands in our digital archive going back to 1978 – all available to ABR subscribers.

hat is the relation between poet and critic? No, not a topic for yet another tedious and oppositional debate at a writers’ festival. Rather, a question about the nature of oppositions, and the possibility of disrupting, or even suspending them, in the varied and delicate acts of literary criticism. Let me frame my question even more precisely: who is the ‘Gwen Harwood’ to whom I refer when I write about the poetry of a women who in recent years has become increasingly public, celebrated, and accessible? In her intriguing and controversial study of feminism, poetry and criticism, The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, Jacqueline Rose demonstrates just how necessary – and impossible – it is to escape the structuring narratives of a critical tradition that seems to anticipate our every move. Such a tradition, it is well known, is tensely organised around a polarity between poetry and criticism, between the authorial roles of poet and critic, between, in this case, Gwen Harwood and Stephanie Trigg. Chatting her way through the genuinely different critical interests that represent Plath to us in varied ways, Rose demonstrates with persuasive ease their dualistic structures. We fall prey to such a pattern, for example, when we argue that either Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes generates the greater degree of poetic or psychological violence. Similarly, Plath is neither the pure baby victim of patriarchy nor the sole generator of her own psychic distress. Here is Rose: ‘One does not become pure as the other falls into the dirt (that crazy pass the parcel acted out by so many writers on Sylvia Plath).’ Sensitive and personal as it is, the haunting of Gwen Harwood – both the poetic and private ghosts with whom she wrestles and her own ghostly presence, looking over the critic’s shoulder – comes nowhere near the notorious contentions and litigiousness of the Plath estate, or the political complexities of Plath’s critical reception. Even so, given Harwood’s increasing importance, and the current wave of critical and biographical interest in her life and works, it is tempting to position her as a testing ground for feminist poetic criticism in Australia. Not on obvious thematic grounds, perhaps. Harwood’s poetry cannot easily be described as woman-centred, or as addressed primarily to women. However, the best feminist criticism has always thrived, not on the obvious, but on the oblique. A comparison with Dorothy Hewett may help make the point. Harwood’s life and politics seem by contrast far more domestic, less radical, more mainstream; but who would argue that Harwood’s poetry 68 A UST RALIAN BOOK REVIEW J U N E 2021

showed less strength, force or passion? Further, is this the best critical vocabulary in which to describe or interpret her poetry? And is interpretation really my aim? I might rephrase my questions completely. What form of feminist critique might Gwen Harwood generate? What contexts provide the most appropriate frames to her work? Current critical fashion in Australia offers me a seductively easy option. Writing for an author-based series suggests a narrative frame; a biographical, developmental model, organised around a corpus of works, signed by a known, or theoretically knowable subject. Most of the critical work on Harwood published so far follows this model. Unlike Sylvia Plath, though, my author can answer back, can commend or condemn readings and interpretations. Gwen Harwood is exceptionally, and increasingly, generous of her time and energies to scholars, interviewers, students, and journalists. Her reputation continues to flourish, as occasional versifier, as contributor to conference panels, as prize-winner, as audience member in discussions of her own poetry, as librettist, as colleague and friend, and perhaps most of all, as correspondent. The temptations, then, to appeal to Harwood as authority are legion. And so are the dangers, of course. Alison Hoddinott’s recent study is a clear, and touching demonstration of how fine the dividing line can be between criticism of a friend’s poetry and heroine worship. Jenny Strauss’s Boundary Conditions: The poetry of Gwen Harwood grapples honourably with the problem of Harwood’s love of disguises, personae and masks, but still tends to appeal to Harwood as governing authority over all these operatic voices. Foucault does offer a solution, of course, which is to focus on ‘Gwen Harwood’ as a poetic signature written by the desires and interests of her readers, rather than as the living subject, one of the starting points of biography, for example. And certainly there is much to be gained from an analysis and critique of the orthodoxies in Harwood studies, a critique mounted from an oblique angle made so much easier for me by the work of these other women. Such a Foucauldian project sits in some tension, however, with a feminist insistence on women’s lives, on the circumstances in which real women, not disembodied author-functions, write poetry – and literary criticism. But if it is impossible, as I would argue, for a woman poet not to haunt, and to be haunted, it is perhaps also necessary for the feminist critic always to be haunted by such difficulties. Rather than exorcising ghosts, then, my task is to keep them before me. g

Australian Book Review, June 2021 issue, no. 432

Articles inside

Stephanie Trigg

A. Frances Johnson

Ian Dickson

Jane Clark

Jordan Prosser

Andrew Fuhrmann

Felicity Chaplin

Lisa Harper Campbell

James Antoniou

Lisa Gorton

Derrick Austin

Ann-Marie Priest

Yen-Rong Wong

Josephine Rowe

Georgia White

Jane Sullivan

Valentina Gosetti

J.R. Burgmann

Hessom Razavi

Peter McPhee

Omar Sakr

Stan Grant

Seumas Spark

Paul D. Williams

Megan Clement

Zora Simic

Ilana Snyder

James Boyce

Marilyn Lake

Declan Fry

Sarah Holland-Batt

Tom Griffiths

J.T. Barbarese, James Ley