Granny’s Good Reads
with Sonia Lee
The highlight of my reading year is Underland by Robert Macfarlane, closely followed by Horizon by Barry Lopez. Both men are pre-eminent writers about landscape and the human heart—matters on which they write with great urgency because they observe homo sapiens destroying the planet on which we all live. Lopez writes with an extra urgency because, at 74, he has a very serious cancer diagnosis. Horizon is an attempt to describe his experience of six regions: Oregon’s Cape Foulweather, where Captain Cook first set foot in North America and where he observes virgin forest on a mountainside being clear-felled; the Galapagos, where he frees sea lions caught in a net; the Arctic, where he once wrote Arctic Dreams and consults the Inuit for their traditional ecological knowledge; Botany Bay—Captain Cook again—and Port Arthur; western Kenya’s Turkana uplands; and the ice shelves of Antarctica, where he searches for meteorites—and flies a kite. Lopez is a man of many parts: ecologist, geologist, archaeologist and photographer. He calls Horizon an ‘autobiographical reflection’ in which he tries to explain his driven need to explore the world’s most rugged and inhospitable corners. In a footnote he directs the reader to an article in Harper’s in which he describes being sexually abused in childhood by a family ‘friend’. One wonders if this explains, partly at least, his restless urge to explore. This book is Lopez’s crowning achievement: a long, challenging, sorrowful and beautiful work on which he laboured for 35 years. Underland is all about Robert’s Adventures Underground, most of them so difficult and dangerous that my heart was in my mouth just reading about them. In a cave system in the Mendips his belay rope becomes entangled and it’s touch-and-go for him until he’s able to climb out. He spends three days in the catacombs under Paris, where he’s trapped in a narrow crevice and, for an achingly long spell, can go neither forward nor back. In northern Italy he ventures for a thousand feet ‘into an immense rotunda of stone, cut by a buried river and filled with dunes of black sand’. He visits a Finnish underground nuclear waste dump, supposedly ‘the most secure place on earth’. He began writing this book in 2010, while the Deepwater Horizon disaster was unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, and finished it in 2018 as the Thai soccer team and their coach were being rescued from the cave system into which they’d unwisely ventured. He spends time with some remarkable people, including a mycologist called Merlin, who introduced him to the ‘wood wide web’ of the fungal network by which trees transmit nutrients and even send messages to each other. My favourite is Bjørnar Nicolaisen, the fisherman who spent three years fighting a proposal for oil-drilling which would have largely destroyed Norway’s pristine Arctic cod fisheries. Macfarlane’s time is one of ‘burial and unburial and deep time’: in the north of Russia some buried reindeer infected with anthrax spores reappear as the permafrost melts, resulting in the infection of 23 people and the death of a child, and in Greenland a US army base buried with a load of chemical contaminants during the Cold War is now coming to light again. Meanwhile the miners are waiting avidly for the melt to be complete so they can dig up the minerals and rare earths that we need for our smartphones and other gewgaws, paying no heed to the dangers posed to coastal cities as the ice caps melt. Macfarlane’s sobering conclusion is that by now we’ve become too addicted to the extractive industries to be able to stop easily, and that the climatic consequences of past human actions have gone well beyond our control. In a lyrical and moving final chapter, he takes his four-year-old son Will to a place a mile from their home where ‘nine springs flow clear from the bedrock’. Lopez’s Horizon and Macfarlane’s Underland are definite Must Reads. It’s a bittersweet experience reading Metropolis by the late Philip Kerr, because it’s the very last outing of everyone’s favourite detective, Bernie Gunther. Kerr takes us back to 1928, during the Weimar Republic, just as the Nazi Party is beginning to take hold, anti-Semitism has become the prevailing sentiment, and inflation and unemployment are forcing numerous women to become prostitutes. Bernie’s task is to find who has killed four prostitutes, murdered and scalped in as many weeks. Another challenge is a murderer who specialises in the crippled war veterans begging in the streets. Bernie wonders if it’s the same perpetrator in both cases. A notable crime boss whose daughter was murdered then puts pressure on Bernie to solve the case. As a last resort his boss asks him to go on the street under cover and impersonate a crippled vet. Beautifully written, with memorable one-liners, interesting characters and a fascinating setting, this is one not to miss. Sonia
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Now in paperback You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote & Inspired the World by Clare Wright, $35
Australian Studies
Venom: Vendettas, Betrayals & the Price of Power by David Crowe ($35, PB)
They plotted. They schemed. They unleashed chaos. Australia lost 2 prime ministers in 3 years in a period of political bloodshed that took the nation’s government to the brink of collapse—until an extraordinary election changed everything. Venom is the secret history of the brutal power play to lead the government. It sheds new light on the fall of Tony Abbott, the rise of Malcolm Turnbull & the electrifying leadership spill that brought parliament to a halt in August 2018. In a day-by-day account, it reveals the strategy Scott Morrison used to defeat his opponents and claim ultimate authority. A cracking account of the rivalries & hatreds that split the Liberal Party, brought down Malcolm Turnbull & propelled Scott Morrison to power.
Gun Control: What Australia got right (and wrong) by Tom Frame ($35, PB)
In the aftermath of the Port Arthur massacre in 1996, John Howard surprised his colleagues & the nation by moving swiftly to transform Australia’s lax firearm laws. The National Firearms Agreement, produced just 12 days after the massacre with support from all levels of government & across the political divide, is now held up around the world as a model for gun control. Tom Frame analyses whether the government achieved its intention & what it might have done in response to the massacre, and didn’t. ‘Anyone interested in learning how a democratic nation reduced senseless gun deaths needs to read this.’—Jeffrey Bleich, former US Ambassador to Australia.
Project RAINFALL: The secret history of Pine Gap by Tom Gilling ($33, PB)
At the height of the Cold War the chief of one of Australia’s spy agencies joined 3 CIA men at a remote site in Central Australia to toast the success of a top secret project known in US intelligence circles as RAINFALL. The CIA listening station at Pine Gap was officially called the Joint Defence Space Research Facility, but it had nothing to do with research & was joint in name only: Australians were hired as cooks & janitors but the first spies were all American. The job of the satellites controlled from Pine Gap was to eavesdrop on Soviet missile tests. While government ministers denied that Australia was a nuclear target, bureaucrats in Canberra secretly planned for Armageddon in the suburbs of Alice Springs. No longer just a listening station, Pine Gap has metamorphosed into a key weapon in the Pentagon’s war on terror, with Australians in frontline roles. Drawing on declassified documents in Australian & US archives, Tom Gilling’s book exposes the uncensored story of Australia’s most secret place.
Andrew Bolt, the Far Right & the First Nations: Deconstructing a demagogue by Steve Mickler
The rights of First Nations peoples are ‘racist’, left-wing activists are ‘fascists’ & immigration has become tantamount to a ‘foreign invasion’. These are some of the core concepts found in the daily demagoguery of ‘Australia’s most read’ social & political commentator, Andrew Bolt. Packaged as being underpinned by patriotism, conservative values & egalitarian principles, this book argues, Bolt’s commentary frequently resonates with the ideas & sentiments of the Far Right—ultra-nationalism, cultural chauvinism & a reactionary hostility to progressive thought. History has taught us that these ideas stand against democracy, internationalism, the security of Indigenous & non-Indigenous peoples alike. ($25, PB)
How Powerful We Are: Behind the scenes with one of Australia’s leading activists by Sally Rugg
Sally Rugg is Executive Director at political activist group change. org, and was previously Campaign Director at GetUp. This is her manifesto for championing what you believe is right. In these pages Sally will teach you some of the things she learnt on the marriage equality campaign: how to develop a strategy, how to frame your messages, how to get your campaign to the media, how to build community power. And she’ll share with you the much harder lessons learnt: the consequences of campaign decisions; how to weather criticism & harassment from every angle; and how, in mass campaign movements, nothing is black & white. ($33, PB)
Secret: The Making of Australia’s Security State by Brian Toohey ($40, PB)
Elected governments pose the greatest threat to Australians’ security. Political leaders increasingly promote secrecy, ignorance & fear to introduce new laws that undermine individual liberties & magnify the risks of being dragged into a horrific new war for no good reason. It is a criminal offence to receive or publish a wide range of information unrelated to national security. Our defence weapons are so dependent on US technical support that Australia couldn’t defend itself without US involvement. The Commonwealth is amassing comprehensive databases on citizens’ digital fingerprints & facial recognition characteristics. True? False? Brian Toohey’s book will help you decide. Fresh archival material & revealing details of conversations between former CIA, US State Department & Australian officials will make you reconsider the world around you.
