National Cultural Policy

Much has been written since the prime minister launched Labor’s new National Cultural Policy at a popular music venue in Melbourne on 30 January, and Advances suspects there is a lot more to come.

Mostly, the response has been positive – one of relief even. Here, after a decade of neglect, ministerial contempt, and fiscal raids, was a federal government prepared to acknowledge the importance (and precarity) of the arts and to propose, in a holistic form known as Revive, new ways of celebrating, administering, and funding the arts.

The proof of the pudding, of course, will be in the eating. Money that George Brandis notoriously ripped from the Australia Council budget in 2015 will be restored, though commentators noted that – allowing for CPI – the budget has decreased in real terms over those eight years. Literature’s share of that budget is lamentably small – about four per cent. If more writers are to receive grants, more magazines like ABR to increase payments to writers and help lift industry standards, literature’s proportional share of funding must increase. We all look to the federal government for a substantial injection of funds into the new Writers Australia, which from 2025 will provide direct support to the literary sector.

The establishment of a Poet Laureate must be a good thing. Here, the selection process will be sensitive. A savvy, persuasive Laureate – with full autonomy and sufficient resources – will play a vital role in the promotion of poetry to the broader community.

The removal of the prime ministerial veto in the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards is similarly welcome. As recently as the December 2022 issue, ABR has lamented past indulgences and interference. It will be a great day, too, when these pivotal awards are announced punctually to support the book industry’s promotion of featured titles.

ABR readers – like our many contributors (more than 300 of them each year) – appreciate the importance of federal grants for this publication. Many of you expressed your disappointment and solidarity when the Australia Council decided not to fund ABR in the 2021–24 round. Soon after the announcement of the new National Cultural Policy, ABR submitted its EOI for the 2025–28 round. Just one of our goals, as stated in this document, is a commitment to raise our rate for freelance writers substantially in 2025 – if we are funded. We will keep our readers apprised of the outcome in coming months.

Jennifer Mills – author, critic, and director of the Australian Society of Authors – writes about the new National Cultural Policy in this issue. (Her article is ‘A Revival Meeting at the Espy’.)

Meanwhile, we wish the federal government and the Australia Council well as they set out to implement this ambitious and much-needed policy.

Tours galore

This week we’re off to Adelaide again, where it all began for ABR in 1961. Once again we have a full contingent for our week-long tour, which is presented in association with our commercial partner, Academy Travel.

Months out, ABR’s Vienna tour is close to filling up, so be quick if you are interested in joining the twelve-day study tour based in Vienna.

Christopher Menz – who will lead both of these tours with Peter Rose – is interviewed about Vienna and design on the ABR Podcast, a good way to get to know ABR’s popular cicerone.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is now open for entries until 24 April. We are looking for original works of between 2,000 and 5,000 words. These single-authored stories should be written in English and can be written in any style or genre.

The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500, with the winner receiving $6,000. The judges this year are Gregory Day, Jennifer Mills, and Maria Takolander. The Jolley Prize unfailingly unearths exciting and fresh talent and work. Past winners include the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award winner Jennifer Down (for ‘Aokigahara’) and Madelaine Lucas, whose 2018 Jolley Prize-winning short story ‘Ruins’ has evolved into part of her forthcoming novel Thirst for Salt (April, Allen & Unwin).

Correction

The print version of Timothy J. Lynch’s commentary ‘Enough already! Post-Trump America returns to the centre’ (ABR, January–February 2023) referred to ‘Senator Liz Cheney’. This should have read ‘Congresswoman Liz Cheney’.

Policy announcements are a peculiar kind of theatre, and Labor’s launch of its new five-year arts plan, Revive, was a strong example of the genre. It was held at Melbourne’s iconic Espy in St Kilda, a venue where arts audiences were treated to words of encouragement from Minister Tony Burke on his speaking tour to spruik the submissions process in 2022, and where ‘DJ Albo’ once entertained a modest crowd.

I watched it on the livestream, along with more than sixteen hundred others from around the country. Onscreen, the name Revive was superimposed on an ochre horizon under a pale sky. Someone in the design department understood just how parched the Australian arts and culture sector had been feeling after a decade of cuts and compounding crises.

Like a big-ticket book launch, numerous speakers and performers were invited to pad out the announceable material (concrete policy changes and budget figures). Opera singer and composer Deborah Cheetham let her voice soar. There was a poetry reading by Sarah Holland-Batt. Music and literature were a clear focus. This was fitting, given that these two areas have been worst served in recent years. With scarce government funding increasingly skewed to protected major performing arts companies such as The Australian Ballet and Opera Australia, and to the bare survival of our biggest institutions, music and literature have often been left to the private sector, with little incentive for big publishers to support local content. Australia Council CEO Adrian Collette has called literature ‘our most under-funded art form’.

For many years, the arts has been a site of ideological combat. Each incoming federal government has trampled on the previous government’s approach. Creative Australia, the last attempt at an arts and culture policy, was announced in 2013 after a long and arduous process of consultation, but was torn up within months when Tony Abbott took office. Creative Nation, from 1994, fared little better, lasting only two years before it was shredded.

Revive is a five-year plan from a government that clearly expects to remain in power for at least two terms. It is also a government that is willing to allow arts and culture to take centre stage for a moment, with a policy launch from the PM himself – introduced, of course, as ‘the artist formerly known as DJ Albo’.

Labor likes to celebrate its legacy. There were numerous references to Gough Whitlam’s vision for the arts, the contribution of Paul Keating’s ministry and Creative Nation, and Creative Australia (Simon Crean, arts minister at the time, was in the audience). Albanese was not shy in referring to the past ten years as ‘a decade in which opportunity wasn’t so much missed as thrown away’, characterising the Coalition’s approach as one of ‘calculated neglect’.

In Unmaking Angas Downs, researcher and writer Shannyn Palmer seeks to understand why a derelict pastoral station in Central Australia, once a hub for First Nations people and a popular tourist destination en route to Watarrka Kings Canyon, was abandoned. Established by white pastoralist Bill Liddle in the late 1920s, Angas Downs is 300 kilometres south-west of Mparntwe Alice Springs at a place known as Walara to Anangu. Curious about the shifting fortunes of Angas Downs, Palmer travels to Walara to uncover the ‘histories that are obscured by the single, fixed idea of the pastoral station’.

Unmaking Angas Downs is a recalibration of Central Australian history spanning the seismic shifts in Indigenous–settler relations during the mid-twentieth century, from the pastoral era through the assimilation period’s ‘ration times’ and welfarism’s ‘sit-down times’, the expansion of tourism, to the emergence of self-determination and the return-to-Country movements. The effect of Anangu stories, recounted to Palmer and included here, is an unravelling of station mythology with its romanticised conceptions of Territorian life during the twentieth century.

It has been a long time since the West had a hero like Volodymyr Zelensky, who is frequently ranked alongside Winston Churchill as a wartime leader and orator, Mikhail Gorbachev as a reformer, and Emmanuel Macron as a political disruptor. However deserved these comparisons may be, they deflect attention from the murky post-Soviet environment which shaped his career. The collapse of the region’s communist economy has left a legacy of corruption which, together with the deep intertwining of Ukrainian and Russian society, means that Zelensky’s case is not as clear-cut as it may seem to outsiders.

Journalist Serhii Rudenko is an insider. He finished writing Zelensky two months after the Russian assault of February 2022, and he praises the Ukrainian president (elected in 2019) as a courageous and inspirational wartime leader. But the bulk of his book is about Zelensky before he became a hero – and before he became a vehement critic of Vladimir Putin. Zelensky now thunders against the Kremlin, but before he became a politician he avidly pursued a career in Russia’s television industry, long a mouthpiece for Putin’s regime. Zelensky has recently ruled out any ‘compromises as to the sovereignty, freedom and territorial integrity of my country’, yet he came to power calling for a negotiated solution with Moscow – a solution which, his opponents said, would have involved just such a compromise.

Zelensky, like many Ukrainians a native Russian speaker, got his start in a comedy team called Kvartal 95, named after a suburb in his home town, the industrial city of Kryvyi Rih. Kvartal 95 served its apprenticeship in KVN (to use its Russian acronym), a comedy and entertainment game show which originated in the Soviet Union, then went international. In 2003, Zelensky founded a production studio, also named Kvartal 95, which became the platform for his successful film and television career, culminating in his starring role in the series Servant of the People, in which an obscure history teacher becomes president of Ukraine.

Robert Menzies retired as prime minister more than fifty-three years ago and died in 1978, yet he remains not just a dominant figure in Australian political history but a strong influence on modern political affairs. As Zachary Gorman, editor of this latest book on Menzies, argues, ‘it has become almost a cliché to say that he built or at least shaped and moulded modern Australia’. He created the Liberal Party that has governed Australia for fifty of the past seventy-three years, and modern Liberal politicians still draw on Menzies’ ideals.

This book grew out a conference at the Robert Menzies Institute in 2021. Opened in 2021 at the University of Melbourne, the Institute commemorates the life and legacy of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister, so it might be expected that this book would provide a favourable view of Menzies. That is certainly the case; nonetheless, the chapters are by accomplished and distinguished scholars, and they all make persuasive cases.

Rather than a straight biography, the result is a series of think-pieces on various aspects of Menzies’ early life and career. The background and qualifications of the authors is key to understanding their approach and conclusions, and it is therefore disappointing that the book does not give us any information about them, though many readers will be familiar with them. Gorman, academic coordinator of the Menzies Institute, is the only one whose qualifications are indicated. The first chapter, a fine and perceptive general assessment of Menzies, is by David Kemp, but it would have been useful to be reminded that he is a former Liberal MP, the author of books on Liberal politics, and deputy chair of the Institute.

The description of Menzies’ school days is written by Troy Bramston, author of successful biographies of Hawke, Keating, and Menzies. Bramston argues that Menzies’ early years established his values, virtues, and vices. In a book that is largely free of contrary views, Bramston concludes that when Judith Brett claims that ‘Menzies wanted to kill his father and have sex with his mother’, her view ‘is utterly bonkers’.

Shirley Hazzard challenged Auden’s line that poetry makes nothing happen. In her case, she said, poetry made everything happen. It was because she learned Italian as a teenager in order to read Leopardi in the original that she was sent, aged twenty-six, by the United Nations, to Italy, where she wrote ‘Harold’, the story about the awkward young poet that was published in the New Yorker in 1960, after which ‘everything changed’.

In Hazzard’s self-mythology, the story about the young poet was the first she submitted to the New Yorker, but, writes Brigitta Olubas, she had sent others to the magazine before which had not been published. Hazzard’s first New Yorker story, appearing in 1961, was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’, which was written in Siena but set in suburban Sydney, where Hazzard was born in 1931. Her relations with her natal land were always ambiguous, and it was in keeping with her reinvention that Hazzard would later root her genius in the Old World rather than the new one.

When journalist Kate Legge’s husband of twenty-five years – former Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood – cheated on her with one of her girlfriends, she was discouraged from taking revenge in her most natural of forums: the printed word. Legge, who at the time worked as a features writer at The Australian newspaper, was lucky enough to have a wise adviser and fellow wordsmith discourage her from an impetuous dash to publish and be damned, or what Legge refers to as ‘every writer’s therapeutic reflex’. Instead, Legge, aware that the aftermath of an affair is not the time for momentous declarations or public confessions – and wanting to protect their two sons – adopts a double life: smiling grimly through workdays and functions, while internally afflicted by grief, self-hatred, fury, and an increased vigilance of her husband and his devices. When she discovers not one but two mistresses, she forwards the emails of one paramour to the other, puncturing any fantasies that they were unique in Hywood’s eyes.

Infidelity and Other Affairs was written more than a decade after Legge’s marriage came apart. While the work benefits from hindsight, it is clear the wound is yet to fully heal, although Legge is impressively restrained when meting out blame. The deceit must have been breathtaking. She was with Hywood for close to three decades; longer than she had known her own mother, who died when she was twenty-three. They enjoyed a life of shifting addresses, of setting up home in foreign cities and re-establishing routines and journalism careers in new places. They enjoyed a circle of close friends and holidayed with other couples. Hywood’s betrayal was with a woman whom Legge had once considered a close friend. Legge is a stylish writer, given to thoughtful and considered expression, and yet the most powerful moments are ones of telling brevity: ‘He called us quits,’ she writes after Hywood, whom Legge still calls her husband, moves to Sydney to helm a media company. When a letter of apology arrives from the mistress on grey Basildon Bond notepaper, Legge informs us drily: ‘I shredded it.’

Anyone who has read J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007) will vividly recall the character Alan – annoyingly brash, unethical, self-serving and sexist; one of a new generation of tech-savvy investment consultants. For British academic, literary critic, and writer Andrew Gibson, in this new study of Coetzee, these are among the typical traits of neoliberal individualism that Coetzee’s body of writing resists and critiques. Gibson characterises contemporary global neoliberalism as having led not just to the impoverishment of modern culture but to a lack of planetary care, resulting in climate change, precarity, and depleted resources. The book’s dustjacket brings these issues closer to home; it features an apocalyptic image of the thick orange smoke from the 2019 bushfires at the New South Wales coastal town of – appropriately – Eden. (Gibson was in Australia at this time as a Visiting Professor at the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice in Adelaide.)

Gibson describes himself as a ‘neophyte’ in Coetzee studies, having only started reading his novels in 2005 while staying at the home of a colleague in Paris, a belated response to the exhortations of his friend, Coetzee scholar Yoshiki Tajiri, to read them. This enables him to propose new readings of Coetzee’s literary works from a more contemporary and global perspective, signalling, for the most part, his difference from those critics who came before. He aims to move away from interpretative literary criticism to what he calls interventionist criticism via the method of ‘strong reading’ proposed by Jean-Jacques Lecercle. For Gibson, this involves focusing on a particular problem – that of how to resist neoliberal culture usefully – and then to ‘work alongside’ Coetzee’s work, by analysing the literary means by which the texts perform this ‘politics of the aesthetic’ (Jacques Rancière’s term).

Gibson finds echoes of his own almost polemical critique of neoliberal culture in his readings of Coetzee, whose thought, he writes, ‘is at odds with the normative parameters of disingenuous neoliberal discourse’. He admits, though, that this critique may often be identified more as a tone in the writing than as direct thematic engagement. Even so, he proposes nothing less than ‘a Coetzeean ontology’ that includes its own ‘especial form of dissidence’, emphasising the heft and contemporary importance of Coetzee’s literary work.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in Eleanor Dark (1901–85), which singles her out from the group of women who dominated the Australian literary scene in the 1930s and 1940s, and attends to the literary significance as well as the political and historical contexts of her work. While Miles Franklin and Katharine Susannah Prichard have been the subject of massive biographies, there have been no major critical studies of their writing. Their contemporaries such as Nettie Palmer, Jean Devanny, M. Barnard Eldershaw, and Dymphna Cusack have fallen out of sight. But since the publication of Eleanor Dark: A writer’s life by Barbara Brooks in 1998, there has been a steady stream of essays and book chapters, a special issue of the journal Hecate, a second biography, and now a critical monograph on the work of this novelist.

As well as the intrinsic interest of Dark’s ten novels, the establishment of a writers’ retreat at her former home Varuna, in the Blue Mountains, has no doubt contributed to this upsurge of attention. A further factor has been the re-emergence of modernism and modernity as key issues in literary studies, and a concern to reposition the study of Australian literature outside a nationalist paradigm so as to enter more fully into this transnational conversation.

This is the context of Melinda Cooper’s scholarly study of the ‘middlebrow modernism’ of Dark’s interwar novels. This apparently contradictory term signals its thesis that Dark ‘repackaged experimental devices and progressive ideas in accessible and entertaining stories’ that ‘provided readers with a winning combination of both quality and entertainment’. Middlebrow Modernism focuses more on the ideas than on readers’ reception of the novels, with chapters offering an extended analysis of each of Dark’s first six titles.

'I hear that those new people have decided to have books in their library,’ remarked Edith Wharton disdainfully. That put-down, from an eminent novelist and book lover who was also a wealthy member of upper-class New York society, was delivered without ambiguity in the 1920s. The ‘new people’ were using books as interior decoration. They would never disturb the display of handsome volumes in their unused library by taking one from the shelf. Could they even read? Probably not, Wharton thought: they had been too busy making money.

Today, Wharton’s words no longer carry the same dismissive meaning. It is indeed possible to have a library without books in it, assuming that the definition of a book involves paper and print. We have e-books and talking books. Last time I looked around the magnificent domed Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, most of the readers were intent on their screens. Today’s joys, which include Trove and other digitised sources, have changed the scholar’s world, and mostly for the better. There are losses – the serendipity of finding a misplaced or unknown document might be one. Touching the original of a letter, even with a gloved hand, brings its writer closer. Another loss is the diminished companionship in a Manuscripts Room. But does anyone really want to be an internet Luddite?

There needn’t be a choice. As well as the newer ways of transmission, the book in its traditional form still flourishes. There are books in the National Library of Australia, as always. The Library now celebrates fifty years as a publisher with the remarkable story of Alec Bolton, the first director of its publishing program.

One of the more addictive podcasts I heard in 2022 was BBC Radio 4’s The Coming Storm, a history of the QAnon conspiracy theory and its connection to the attack on the US Capitol in January 2021. In a late episode, host Gabriel Gatehouse ponders the disturbing implications of his topic for how we think about narratives, and about the role narratives play in all our lives. ‘In a democracy,’ he says, ‘the winner is not always the one who has the best ideas. The winner is the one who tells the best story – and QAnon, this tale of a looming battle between good and evil, that’s the stuff of myths and legends.’

It is not news that stories matter – for identities, knowledges, and cultures as much as for politics. The Coming Storm’s great insight will therefore strike many of us as partly trivial. Still, Gatehouse’s worry points to a growing consensus that we inhabit historically fractured narrative worlds, where the varied tales we hear and tell may be growing increasingly, even violently, incommensurable. Right or wrong, this view exemplifies what the critic and novelist Peter Brooks terms the ‘narrativist position’ in contemporary thought, a dominant tendency to understand life and culture as not just reflected in stories but constituted by them. Where this tendency comes from, and whatever are its merits, are the subjects of Brooks’s compelling, if ultimately frustrating, new book.

Brooks begins Seduced by Story: The use and abuse of narrative with two premises. The first is that from popular art to political propaganda to corporate branding and everywhere in between, story and storytelling have become public culture’s prevailing energies. Brooks sees this development as ‘the storification of reality’, and he recounts awakening to it while listening to George W. Bush introduce the members of his first Cabinet. ‘Each person has got their own story that is so unique,’ pronounced the new president of his appointees, ‘stories that really explain what America can and should be about.’ At once numbingly bland and alarmingly ideological, this is the sort of calculatedly fuzzy ‘storying’ that troubles Brooks and that, he convincingly shows, should trouble the rest of us as well.

An early-morning jogger. An alleyway. A young woman’s mutilated body. A set-up familiar enough to warrant its own Television Tropes category (‘Jogger Finds Death’). Yet before catching sight of the latter-day Black Dahlia being pecked at by ibises somewhere off Enmore Road, unlucky passer-by Reagan Carsen is caught in a spider’s web: a simple but effective visual metaphor for the wider web that connects her to the first victim of the fictional ‘Sydney Dahlia’ serial killings.

More compelling than the question of whodunit, initially, is Reagan’s bizarre reaction to her discovery. She is panicked by the victim’s resemblance (or imagined resemblance) to herself. She refrains from calling the police, fearful of being tied to the scene and interrogated. While far from heartless – she notes the colour of the victim’s nail polish, shoos a scavenging bird – Reagan chooses to flee, leaving the corpse exposed to the elements on a sweltering Sunday morning.

Following on from a memoir, How to Be Australian (2020), and a thriller novella, My Name Is Revenge (2018), Dark Mode is the first full-length crime novel of Canadian-born Sydney-based author Ashley Kalagian Blunt. Though billed as a psychological thriller for the online age, the action of Dark Mode is largely IRL. Beginning exactly seventy years after the original Black Dahlia murder, in the days surrounding Donald Trump’s inauguration, as Sydney experiences record high temperatures, Dark Mode is a self-aware crime novel that wears its influences and politics openly. Blunt’s pre-#MeToo Sydney is a powder keg of misogyny, offline and on.

A marshmallow is a common confectionery, white and pink, made of gelatin, sugar, and water. We put them in hot chocolate, toast them over campfires. Marshmallow is also a plant, Althea officinalis, containing a jelly-like substance which has been used for medicinal purposes as far back as the time of Ancient Egypt. A marshmallow can also describe someone who is soft to a fault, even vulnerable. That there might be anything approaching complexity linked to this word is unlikely, but by the end of Victoria Hannan’s second novel, Marshmallow (Hachette, $29.99 pb, 292 pp), it is obvious that something as apparently innocuous as that confectionery and medicinal ingredient can have many implications; the intriguing title is an early indication that much will be going on, none of it straightforward.

Five close friends are approaching the first anniversary of a devastating event, what should be the third birthday of a child who has died. As this is clear upfront in the novel – as early as page fifteen – the mystery at the heart of the story is not that this happened, but how it happened and, more importantly, why not only the child’s parents but also the other three friends feel as implicated, indeed as guilty, as they do. 

In contrast with Kokomo (2020), Hannan’s acclaimed first novel, Marshmallow is a slow burn. Readers who relished the former’s audacious beginning may need to be more patient as the author gradually folds together the intersecting lives of her characters and begins to scatter hints regarding the story’s central crisis.  Softened, too, is the sharp wit which, while exhilarating in that first novel, might have been hard to sustain, and risk sounding facile. Set over two days and tightly structured, Marshmallow offers a somewhat more restrained tone and is the better for it. In any case, the subject matter here demands a sober approach.

Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, Nights of Plague, is set on a fictitious island called Mingheria, the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire, located in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea. In 1901, following the order of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, a steamer carrying an eminent Ottoman delegation consisting of various Ottoman officials entrusted with mitigating political animosity between China’s Muslims and European powers sets sail for China.

Notable among the steamer’s passengers are Dr Bonkowski Pasha, the Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation; his assistant Dr Ilias; Princess Pakize, the newlywed daughter of the deposed Sultan Murad V, and her husband, Prince Consort Doctor Nuri Bey; and Major Kâmil, the officer assigned by the palace to guard the delegation. Soon we learn that Dr Bonkowski Pasha and his assistant Dr Ilias are not headed to China and will disembark at Mingheria to investigate a possible outbreak of the plague.

Populated by Muslims and Orthodox Greeks, Mingheria functions as a microcosm of the Ottoman Empire in its ailing years. Immediately after his arrival, Dr Bonkowski learns that Mingheria’s governor, Sami Pasha, is reluctant to admit the existence of the plague on the island, attributing such claims to domestic and foreign enemies of the Ottoman Empire. Acting as a catalyst, the outbreak polarises the island’s political scene, with Greeks blaming Muslims, and Muslims blaming Greeks.

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.

Margaret Bryce is a self-conscious and self-questioning narrator. We find her shuffling, or being shuffled, through scenes from her life like old photographs. Neither tragic nor spooky, Margaret is pragmatic, a self-described Episcopalian who soon lets us know her impatience with the whole arrangement, declaring: ‘I don’t believe in souls.’ If she seems uncomfortable in a story like this, that’s part of her charm. While her enthusiasm for eager explanatory digressions sometimes seem to belong more to the author than his character – I sometimes wondered if Margaret had access to some afterlife version of Wikipedia – for the most part this chatty ghost is observant company, both enjoying and perturbed by her memories, determined to puzzle out some pattern or purpose in them. She is doing her accounts, the way the dying often do, setting things right as best she can from the elevated, if slippery, perspective of an afterlife.

In his work so far, Dalgarno has proven himself to be very good at evoking life in its details, particularly the minutiae of human relationships. His previous novel, Poly (2020), was a slow suburban relationship drama, a painfully honest blow-by-blow of the insecurities that can attach to polyamorous relationships. Told with a meticulous and sometimes uncomfortable level of detail, that novel – like its characters – struggled to find a balance between honesty and oversharing, but often found quick redemption in self-effacing humour.

Early in Gregory Day’s new novel, Uncle Ferny reads Such Is Life aloud in a Roman bar. His niece Sarah observes listeners’ ‘confusion, amusement, their disdain, their curiosity, and also their rapture’. A similar range of responses might be manifested by readers of The Bell of the World.

This is a novel in which Ferny’s extolling of Joseph Furphy’s genius erupts in a ‘jugulating torrent’ of words. There are characters called Sarah Hutchinson and Sara Atchinson, two women called Maisie, and three males called Joe. Plot threads rise and disappear like floodwater. There are florets of poetry, both conventional and concrete, and skeins of wild philosophy. Jugulating, indeed.

The constant is Sarah Hutchinson, returned from boarding school in England and travels in Europe to live in the fertile region south of Geelong, first with one of the Maisies and later at Ferny’s property Ngangahook, at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. The narrative is arranged less around plot and more around shifting foci: conflict over a planned belltower; the co-binding/combining of Such Is Life with Moby-Dick to form a ‘compounded epic’; an extended epistolary relationship between Sarah and John Cage foregrounding mushrooming and avant-garde music.

It is more than fifty years since anyone attempted to comprehensively describe the history of Australian architecture. In 1968, Sydney academic J.M. Freeland’s Architecture in Australia: A History was a landmark publication. The timing of its release was intended to celebrate 180 years of building on the continent since formal European invasion, marked by the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. As with any ambitious documentary exercise, Freeland’s book was greeted with a mixture of admiration and scorn.

The same might be reserved for Davina Jackson’s new book, Australian Architecture: A history, which bravely sets out to map an even greater time range. It tries to make sense of today’s architectural scene and to fill in some of the gaps that she has identified along the way. To a large degree, Jackson succeeds. That this book was written during the first two years of Covid-19, when access to archives and libraries was severely limited, is no mean feat. Australian Architecture is thus to be welcomed and the author congratulated. Its publication will invite public interest with its easy and approachable writing style and the attractive selection of archival images and colour photographs. At the same time, it will stir, even annoy, historians and scholars with some of its claims and frustrate with the lack of a clear narrative framing.

In the early sixteenth century, the Italian Renaissance poet and philosopher Giulio Camillo conceived an imaginary structure for universal knowledge named The Theatre of Memory; essentially a classical amphitheatre that inverted the position of spectator and stage, turning the auditorium into a tiered structure that fanned into rows of encyclopedic knowledge. Imants Tillers makes no mention of Camillo’s theatre in his anthology of essays, Credo, but the structure could be a parallel schema for his own expansive project The Book of Power – an ongoing inventory of all the canvas board panels Tillers has painted since 1981, which totalled 102,663 by 2018.

Born of immigrant Latvian parentage, Tillers is a renowned Australian artist who garnered national attention in the late 1970s and, through his customary strategy of appropriation, came to typify Australian postmodernism. He is best known for his modular paintings comprising multiple panels of canvas boards which are assembled into grids, fracturing the surface into a matrix of semi-unified parts. Fragments of images from disparate artists and writers interlock into collaged compositions, making his works compendia of literary and artistic quotation.

While paintings have been his primary output over the past fifty years, Tillers has also written essays. Credo is a collection of fourteen of them dating from 1982 to 2019, all previously published, apart from ‘The Sources’ (2019). It is this last essay that elaborates The Book of Power and takes the format of a dictionary of Tillers’ key artistic and literary influences, including Giorgio de Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Georg Baselitz, Jackson Pollock, Sigmar Polke, and Colin McCahon, Novalis, and Stéphane Mallarmé. Committed to continuing his over-arching project, Tillers nonetheless notes, ‘Something [is] always missing – that is, the next work, the next reference, the next source, the next allocated number as it heads in the impossible direction of infinity, never to reach finality or terminus.’ There is a voracity here yet the linking of each of these artists back to his own oeuvre has a touch of self-aggrandisement.

This is Sarah Day’s ninth collection and one of her most thematically diverse to date. She brings to the poems a thoughtful mix of environmentalism (particularly the unruly yet quiet presence of Tasmania’s natural beauty), her British roots (some of the best poems in the collection refer to the poet’s grandmother’s incarceration in an asylum), and a teacher’s precision with free verse. The poems are not overly experimental in terms of lineation, metre, language, or punctuation, and yet freshness of perspective and authenticity arise inevitably from the poet’s liquid observational engagement with the world’s affairs, whether this be with landscape, the global pandemic, racism, or science (planetary, oceanographic, microscopic).

While reviewing Slack Tide, I was reading the New Collected Poems of the late Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944–2020). I felt uncanny resonances between Day’s and Boland’s fine, linguistic intelligence, the pure melody of their poems, and their feminism’s intense engagement with the world and its histories, as filtered through the lens of mythic reinvention and domestic experience. There are some wonderful ekphrastic poems in Day’s collection (a favoured form of Boland’s). For instance, in the poem ‘House like a Folktale’, a mysterious house in Glenbrook – ‘The bowed house / rests comfortably on earth / itself a resting hen’ – assumes the qualities of a Chagall painting where a rhetorical, surreal conversation takes place between locale and visual imagery, and the poet muses, ‘Rules are what people think, / they aren’t a law of nature.’

Day shares with Boland a wonderful aptitude for situating local intuitive concerns into a dialogue with the larger world and its histories. Lockdown is imagined as an Edward Hopper interior. Four-hundred-year-old Neopolitan music on the radio (‘In the Air’) unpacks thoughts of environmental degradation, yet the poem leaves us with lingering hope, ‘notes were made on a score – / the compassionate moment hangs in the air’. Even the collection’s smaller observational sketches – such as ‘School Strike for Climate’, with its opening lines ‘They held our planet in their hands / the way that I once held an orange or a ball’ – coolly and compassionately reflect a kind of looking forward into the generations. Here, also, are some lines from ‘Penstock Lagoon’, a reflective poem about the Ukraine war, selected by editors Jeanine Leanne and Judith Beveridge for Australian Poetry’s Best Australian Poems 2022: ‘Up here, in the tent at night / by an effort of will, the world’s troubles / shrink from the mind’s large screen …’ The poet continually hears an indecipherable sound in the silence, which is finally identified: ‘it is not a falling pearl but a musk duck’. The poem then widens its perspective:

Paul Hetherington’s Ragged Disclosures (Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 112 pp) choreographs its prose poems carefully, which is unsurprising from the co-author and co-editor, respectively, of a scholarly book on prose poetry and Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (both 2020). His new collection employs a lyric-dramatic mode, which Fernando Pessoa described as ‘lyric poetry put into the mouths of different characters’. It features a ‘he’ and a ‘she’ with a ‘shared / Australian vernacular’, in a long, glancing dialogue. These appear most direct in nine ‘Ragged Disclosures’, each comprising three square poems which are bordered and interlinked. ‘Ragged Disclosures 1’ offers a clue to the text: ‘Their ragged / intersections make an unjoined, / searching rapport.’  The poems between these seem to represent this ‘searching rapport’ through shared experience in Rome, Venice, and various other locales, with pronominal shifts to ‘I,’ ‘we’, and ‘you’.

The language is introspective and brims with feeling, as here in ‘Snow’:

They read Chekhov. Words bring snow and
a view of a tangled orchard. Ghosts haunt the
trees, their own speech fails to catch, the air
is chary of sunshine. Someone is playing
backgammon as centuries weigh …

It can be vivid, as in ‘Sidling’, which shows the text’s preoccupation with (often ‘unjoined’) time: ‘A flight of birds; an updraught of air. I watch the estuary / fade; handle my arms, feel your touch on my skin like / drapings of silver water – a few hours, a decade ago.’ Square and rectangular poems, columns of text bordered left and right, and poems within encompassing ‘walls’ – likely connoting restriction – abound. One anomaly is ‘Francis Bacon Triptych’, where a stanza’s walls don’t meet, suggesting aesthetic/emotional ‘slippages’ (the section title) or ‘disclosures’. Another is a sequence of square prose poems with a disorderly final two lines, skittering abruptly out of bounds.

'You got a habit, a bad habit. You fell in love with the hard stuff. You fell for the foxy harlot, the vamp who lives around here somewhere, and you’re silly about her, she’s got you hooked.’

Those words, straight out of some 1950s film noir, are by Bob Dylan, and they open his discussion of a famous song from a Broadway musical that no one, I imagine, has previously considered in quite these terms. My Fair Lady is hardly classic noir. Dylan, though, isn’t concerned with the musical but with Vic Damone’s 1956 recording of ‘On the Street Where You Live’, a song that does indeed nowadays sound as though it were about stalking.

Songs may be about things, but, like all music, they also are things. They are mechanisms with working parts, and Dylan is good at revealing these. ‘On the Street Where You Live’, for example, ‘is all about the three-syllable rhyme: street before, feet before, heart of town, part of town, bother me, rather be’. And then, because he’s Dylan: ‘Vic Damone. Sick at home.’

In The Philosophy of Modern Song, Dylan writes about songs composed by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Stephen Foster, Big Bill Broonzy, Billy Joe Shaver, Rodgers and Hart, and Doc Pomus (to whom the book is dedicated), as sung by the likes of Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Nina Simone, Marty Robbins, the Clash, and Little Richard. The singer is as important as the song, because each version of a popular song will be different. Dylan underlines this when he writes that Roy Orbison’s ‘Blue Bayou’ is ‘both a spectacular song and a spectacular record’.

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) has been well served by translators, especially Michael Hofmann. His works are widely available and at least two are acknowledged masterpieces: Job (1930), a lyrical evocation of the fading world of the East European Jewish shtetl, and The Radetzky March (1932), Roth’s elegy for the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire. Until now there has been no English biography. Keiron Pim takes up the challenge with Endless Flight: The life of Joseph Roth. It is the product of wide-ranging scholarship, a deep immersion in Roth’s oeuvre, and travels in Ukraine, where Roth’s hometown Brody is now located. He shows us Roth as journalist and novelist ‘tracing the continent’s trajectory between the wars in prose of sublime lyricism’ and creating a voice for ‘the marginalised, the alienated and the dispossessed’.

Roth was a man of many gifts – blessed with a brilliant intellect, a rare capacity for empathy, loyal friends, the love of women – but, like the biblical Job, he was marked out for great suffering. He never knew his father, who was declared insane just before his birth. His impoverished mother managed to give him a classical German education, the passport to university, but he found her love stifling. A brilliant student, he was accepted into Lemberg (Lviv), then Vienna University in 1913, but was soon drawn into the Great War. The 1920s – roaming across Europe, reporting for the Frankfurter Zeitung – were happy at first. Then, in 1929, exhausted by their peripatetic lifestyle, his young wife, Friedl, succumbed to schizophrenia. Guilt-stricken, Roth often feared for his own sanity. In 1933 he fled into exile. Stateless and financially dependent on friends, he drank constantly, and suffered an excruciating death from alcohol poisoning in 1939. Friedl was murdered by the Nazis in 1940.

What is money? To most, it is currency in the physical form of bills and coins. To others, it encompasses any form of financial credit that mediates present versus future consumption. To the author Stefan Eich, it is an institution that was historically conceived to promote social justice and democracy, but over time has been neutered of its political nature as a public good.

Over six chapters bookended with a short introduction and epilogue, Eich traces a genealogy of monetary thought from Aristotle to Karl Marx to John Maynard Keynes, who each differed on what money represented but agreed on its symbolic value, not just its transactional use. In doing so, Eich aims to recover money’s political past so that governments might become accountable for the social consequences of restrictive monetary policy and use it to reduce economic injustice and inequality.

Economists usually describe money by its functions: a store of wealth, a medium of exchange, and a unit of account. As a political theorist, Eich challenges this technical definition in his opening chapter with a discussion of ancient Greek coinage, where the word for currency (nomisma) differed from that for wealth (chremata). According to Eich, this linguistic distinction mattered in that, while wealth can be measured with currency, the use of the latter also represented reciprocal exchange among equals and solidarity with the values of a democratic state.

Writing in the eighteenth century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued that the life of a king was made up of two objects: to extend his rule beyond the frontiers; and to make it more absolute within them. Reading those lines, I couldn’t help but think of Vladimir Putin, whose primary political goals seem to mirror those of absolutist monarchs. Rousseau was implying that war was an instrument wielded by capricious princes to serve their own interests. Not long after Rousseau, Antoine-Henri Jomini was the first military strategist to unpack the idea that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Many politicians and military strategists throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century agreed, whether democrats, fascists, or communists. General Ludendorff, Marshal Shaposhnikov, and Mao Zedong all came to the same conclusion: war and politics – one and the same thing.

These are two different explanations for why states go to war. For another kind of explanation that also echoes Putin’s behaviour, we can go back to the Peloponnesian War (431–04 bce). ‘If leaders of individual entities,’ writes Beatrice Heuser, ‘do not regard other entities as having the right to self-determination and independent statehood, the stronger may be tempted to swallow up the weaker.’  The Peloponnesian War was thus an example of a tendency among larger powers to eliminate smaller powers.

I am not arguing that Rousseau, Jomini, or the Peloponnesian War are adequate historical models that help explain Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – readers will understand the reasons are much more complex – only that a number of what might be called universalist principles of warfare and statehood appear to have remained largely the same for millennia. When one country decides to wage war and invade another, for example, there will inevitably be an appeal to the ‘national interest’, to security, and to a kind of toxic patriotism in which it is good to die for one’s country/group/clan, killing being an honourable thing to do. This does not mean that countries which seemingly appear irredeemable, like present-day Russia, cannot change; think of how much Germany’s or Japan’s militaristic societies have been transformed since 1945.

Uwe Radok was born in 1916 in East Prussia to a family of Christian converts who identified as German Protestant. Nevertheless, after the Nazis came to power in Germany, the Radoks were classified as Jews – their five children Mischlinge, of mixed ancestry. In 1938, the family applied to emigrate to Australia. When their visas finally arrived in August 1939, it was too late.

This is a familiar story: family scattered. By late 1939, Uwe and his two younger brothers had left for Britain, his father had been arrested and sent to a concentration camp, and his eldest brother was completing military service in Germany (still required of Mischlinge until 1941); only his sister and mother remained at home. What is more astonishing is that they all survived the war and that Uwe left twelve notebooks documenting the years of his internment as a Class A enemy alien.

The diaries begin aboard the SS Arandora Star in 1940 and end in Melbourne in 1943. His account of those three years – the sinking of the Arandora Star, the voyage to Australia aboard the infamous HMT Dunera, life in internment camps, and the relative freedom of working for the Australian Army’s Employment Company – is impressively even-handed and without rancour. Only occasionally does Radok succumb to ennui or allow a note of sarcasm to creep in, betraying his bitterness:

Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII (1876–1958), bears the dubious distinction of being the twentieth century’s most discredited Catholic – and also the millennium’s most controversial pontiff. The case against Pius, prosecuted most famously by John Cornwell (‘Hitler’s Pope’), is that he aided and abetted, or at least did nothing to prevent, the Nazi regime’s unprecedented crimes against European Jews. A stiff, diffident Roman patrician, he was simply too steeped in cultural anti-Semitism to see the importance of speaking out against Nazi racial ideology or the genocide it encouraged.

As pope (1939–58), Pius prioritised the institutional Church’s survival above all other considerations – even when that meant accommodating unspeakable evil and breaching every tenet of the teachings he claimed to have inherited from Christ. The parallel with a later generation of Catholic leaders who have covered up child sexual abuse ‘for the greater good’ is obvious. Pius’s actions, or rather inaction, leave a stain on the Church comparable to those deriving from more recent scandals. What claims to moral leadership can his successors have when they fail even now to condemn his dishonourable example? Many were disgusted when Benedict XVI declared him venerable in 2009, a status which put him on the path to sainthood.

Professor Joy Damousi was the ARC Kathleen Fitzpatrick Laureate Fellow at the University of Melbourne between 2014 and 2019. The ARC Fellowship made possible the scale of the now published book, enabling research not only in Australia but also the United States, Britain, and Europe. The book evidences the potential of richly funded historical research.

Damousi’s work is a major contribution to the expanding field of humanitarianism, presented as an Australian case study focused on child war refugees. Through a historical lens, it explores complex, multilayered, and shifting meanings. It brings into focus the intersection of humanitarian concerns and broader political questions related to immigration, race, ethnicity, and gender in the era of White Australia.

The chapters are structured around four overlapping concepts: saving, evacuating, assimilating, and adopting. They encompass a range of activities including fundraising, aid and development schemes, child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, and inter-country adoption. The study is theoretically positioned within Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of ‘emotional communities’, in which individuals and their collectives define the valuable and the harmful, ‘the modes of emotional expression that they expect, encourage, tolerate and deplore’.

Spanning six decades, Damousi’s study traverses the two world wars, the Armenian genocide, the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The transnational positioning follows the humanitarians on their travels to sites of conflict, the bringing to Australia of new ideas, languages, and causes, and the taking of Australian perspectives to the global community.

There is a slaughterhouse-like logic to the way humanity’s mistreatment of animals tends to be written about. Repetitive. Relentless. Atrocity piles upon atrocity, with no hope of remedy. Readers, probably appalled by the abattoir to begin with, likely vegetarians or vegans or animal fosterers, discomfort themselves yet again in the name of … what exactly? Duty? Academic interest? A renewed sense of the righteousness of animal liberation? We read on grimly, plumbing the depths of a despair that would feel commonplace if it didn’t remain, always, so excruciatingly raw.

Abandon Every Hope, the first book by Hayley Singer (no relation to Peter, doyen of animal rights in this country), is a short, experimental collection of fragmentary essays. It both deploys well-worn tropes of slaughterhouse literature and attempts to nudge the form forwards or, perhaps more accurately, sideways. Ellipses and caesuras dot the mostly brief paragraphs, bespeaking the absences that define Singer’s subject.

Primarily, Abandon Every Hope is a book concerned with the idea of disappearance, how the plight of animals raised for human consumption is elided by obfuscation and euphemism (while reading, I was periodically reminded of David Brooks’s writings on how language shapes and distorts animal–human relations). It is a sort of thanatological diary, an accounting of the unaccounted for – a lament for the unlamented.

‘That was my first experience of disappearance,’ Singer writes about when her grandmother would feed her corned tongue sandwiches, ‘old-world Jewish comfort food’, about which she felt not revulsion but curiosity. ‘It had,’ she reflects, ‘been neatened’, utterly divorced from its origins, a process Singer describes as ‘banal magic’.

We like to think that we would stick up for ourselves after being wronged. No one wants to be a coward. Often, though, faced with the realities of power, wealth, and superior resources, we shrink from the good fight. More worryingly, humans can misdiagnose or externalise an issue, rationalising it away. We take a problem grounded in interpersonal relationships, politics, or some other social arrangement, and convince ourselves it is an objective, natural state of being. After all, as distinguished artificial intelligence researcher and author Toby Walsh, author of Machines Behaving Badly: The morality of AI, says: ‘We are, for example, frequently very poor at explaining ourselves. All of us make biased and unfair decisions.’

The last in a trilogy exploring the near and far future of AI, Machines Behaving Badly should be commended for its focus on the relationships being constructed with new intelligent machines. Walsh is clearly passionate about AI. For him, the topic of machine intelligence is one requiring compromise, self-improvement, and clear communication. Building fruitful, equitable AI requires the patient nurturing of a healthy relationship, like friendship or romance. Unlike some breathless accounts of AI, for Walsh, there are no easy fixes.

Morality is a question of politics and a vision of the good life. Politics and the good life are, of course, open-ended questions. Walsh is aware of this: ‘There is no universal set of ethical values with which we need to align our AI systems.’  The reader gains a general understanding of Walsh’s values in Machines Behaving Badly. He is concerned with AI’s impact on equality, racial and gender bias, and climate change. Intervening effectively in the development of AI requires making the case, based on an ethical philosophy, that others should care too.

Barry Scott is the publisher at Transit Lounge, an independent press he started with fellow librarian Tess Rice in 2005. He has worked in literary programming, been the recipient of an arts management residency in India and a Copyright Agency grant to research small press publishing in the United States. Beginning with an emphasis on writing about other cultures, particularly Asia, Transit Lounge is now focused on publishing an eclectic mix of Australian literary fiction and non-fiction.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Being a librarian who worked in the literary programming space, I decided that publishing was the obvious the next step. I was involved with administering the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards in 2003 when the Unpublished Manuscript Prize was conceived. At that stage, I became acutely aware that there were many talented writers unable to achieve publication. Transit Lounge always has been and always will be about giving some of those new writers a voice, as well as publishing more established authors.

Salman Rushdie has long inspired ambivalence among readers. His talent has never been seriously in question – witness the swift canonisation and enduring affection accorded his second novel, Midnight’s Children (1981) – nor have his bona fides as a public intellectual who has stood against intolerance and cant, even under the threat of death. Yet his body of work has been marked by fictions that run the gamut from interestingly flawed to merely self-indulgent.

Now comes his thirteenth novel – published in the wake of a brutal public attack by a fanatic nursing a decades-long grievance, leaving the author blind in one eye and without the use of a hand – and it proves to be a triumph in every regard. It is as if Rushdie anticipated the threat of violence hanging over him was about to be realised and found courage and focus in that knowledge. 

Victory City is a shrewdly constructed tale, ambitious in scope, written in prose that slips between registers with acrobatic litheness. Rarely has a narrative been so unillusioned in its world view, while refusing to relinquish its idealism. Never has Rushdie so successfully married imaginative play and considered political impulse.

Brendan Thoms was born in New Zealand in 1988. He lived permanently in Australia from 1994 but never applied for Australian citizenship. Thoms had long-standing familial connections to Australia. His maternal great-great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother were all born in Queensland. They were Australian citizens and recognised members of the Gungarri People. Thoms’s brother had also been living in Australia since 1994, while his sister was born in Queensland in 1995. She was a citizen and, like Thoms, identified and was recognised as Gungarri.

Daniel Love was slightly older. Born in 1979 in Papua New Guinea, Love lived in Australia from 1984. Like Thoms, although not a citizen, Love had close familial connections in Australia. His paternal great-grandparents were born in Queensland and were descendants of First Nations peoples. Love’s paternal grandfather was born in Queensland and served during World War II in the Australian Military Forces in the Middle East, New Guinea, and Papua, settling in Papua following the war, where he met Love’s paternal grandmother. Papua was, at the time, under Australian authority, and she became an Australian citizen in 1961. Love’s father, too, was a citizen, as was his sister. Love identified as a member of the Kamilaroi People, and was recognised as a member by one Elder.

For generations of English literature graduates in the Anglophone world, Terry Eagleton’s name has become synonymous with literary theory, not because he has been its leading practitioner or fiercest advocate, but because he published Literary Theory: An introduction in 1983. This widely assigned primer conceals a deep ambivalence behind its innocuous title: in his conclusion, Eagleton announces that the book has been ‘less an introduction than an obituary’, in the sense that ‘literary theory’, like literature itself, only pretends to name a bounded field of enquiry. Nonetheless, the enterprise of theory rumbled on largely untroubled for two decades (who knows how many of the undergraduates assigned the book made it to the conclusion), and so After Theory (2003) was much less demure: ‘The golden age of cultural theory is long past,’ Eagleton announces on page one. In the preface to the same work he remarks, with disarming bluntness, that theory’s contemporary orthodoxy fails to ‘address itself to questions searching enough to meet the demands of our political situation’.

'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.’ Albert Einstein wrote these words, originally in German, in his book The World As I See It (1934). He went on to describe the ‘knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate’ as constituting ‘the truly religious attitude’, adding he ‘cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes’.

The first of these quotations, and Einstein’s sentiments more broadly, are proffered in Michelle Johnston’s second novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles. The story is set in the labyrinth of a giant public hospital, where the walls of the wards ‘had deaths fossilised in them like rubble’. Here, protagonist Marick – a guilt-stricken schlemiel estranged from his ex-wife, child, and faith – takes up the role of hospital chaplain. Marick soon befriends Hugo, a hospital scientist who believes the bacteria in his covert basement lab are producing gold. The mystery sparks an unforeseen chain of events, within and without the hospital walls. Meanwhile, a twin narrative gradually unfolds to reveal Marick’s story of love and loss.

The theme of gold at the heart of the work is extended to its presentation. The book’s production is a statement of confidence: unusually for a novel, Tiny Uncertain Miracles is packaged as a sizeable hardcover, with attractive cover artwork printed entirely in gold metallic foil over white Wibalin. The eye-catching motif of tiny, organically clustered particles repeats on the cover, in the golden endpapers, and internally as a section-break glyph. The result is an elegant volume with ample shelf presence that suggests HarperCollins means business.

At the conclusion of the third women’s cricket test against England in 1935, Victorian all-rounder Nance Clements souvenired her name plate from the Melbourne Cricket Ground scoreboard. What she discovered on the reverse side of the plate, as Marion Stell recounts in The Bodyline Fix: How women saved cricket, was the name Larwood.

Harold Larwood was, of course, the English bowler who had terrorised Australian batsmen in the Bodyline series not two years before. The brutal bodyline tactic – designed to unnerve batters by firing short-pitched balls at their bodies while stacking the legside field – helped England to a series win. It also strained diplomatic relations between England and Australia.

The banner that Clements begged from the MCG scoreboard attendant – hers and Larwood’s names like two sides of the one coin – demonstrated more than frugality. According to Stell it ‘symbolise[d] the close connection between the two [test] series’.

It hardly matters that Stell’s thesis – that women cricketers ‘were tasked … with showing the world … that the old standards and judgements of “it’s just not cricket” were true and worth defending’ – is a long bow to draw and only superficially argued. For what Stell narrates here is an absolutely ripping yarn, one that requires no contrived hypothesis to justify its telling. The ‘persistence, dedication and single bloody-mindedness’ of the women whose lives Stell documents is justification enough.

Persistence and bloody-mindedness were demanded from the get-go. While a small handful of the original test team acquired their skills playing cricket at school or through university clubs, most had little access to the requisite fields and equipment. Some women made innovative use of broomsticks, tin cans, or tennis balls attached to a clothesline. Others managed to acquire a disused market garden from their local council, recruiting family and friends to help them clear a pitch. One player (Kathleen Commins) recalled ‘fielding among the potatoes that were still growing’.

As the war in Syria enters its second decade, the human scale of the catastrophe is difficult to comprehend. Shocked by the security service’s torture of children who had graffitied the words ‘Down with the regime’ on a wall in the city of Daraa in 2011, nationwide demonstrations rose up against Bashar al-Assad’s tyrannical government. When I ask my now-exiled Syrian colleagues what life was like under the Assad family, they struggle for historical parallels before agreeing that, for them, it resembled Stalin’s Soviet Union and North Korea (a regime the current president’s father, Hafez Al-Assad, looked to for inspiration).

During the Arab Spring of 2010–12, as one after another of the region’s ageing kleptocrats fell, many Syrians felt they could throw off the shackles of the Assad family that had come to power in a military coup in 1971. The Syrian opposition threatened to overwhelm Damascus, only to be driven back by Russian airpower and Iranian ground troops; it was also undermined by internal division.

The United States, under President Barack Obama, committed to ending the ‘forever wars’, was wary of another potential Middle Eastern quagmire. Obama doubted the ability of an opposition coalition of ‘farmers and pharmacists’ to take on the Syrian government, with its Russian and Iranian backers. Under Donald Trump, the focus, for want of a better term, of US policy was on combating the perceived threat of extremism rather than on the state-based terrorism of Assad. Despite the suffering of civilian populations, in John Bolton’s words Syria was little more than a ‘strategic sideshow’ to US administrations. But in the brutal struggle for Syria’s future, torturing children was just the beginning.

Turtles, Leah Lui-Chivizhe shows us in Masked Histories, are at the centre of Torres Strait Islander lives. They follow the Pacific currents and slipstreams, arriving in the Islands in the mating season of surlal, making available their eggs, their meat, their shells. For millennia, marine turtles have provided Islanders with material for subsistence and ceremony – allowing them to practise ceremony with turtle shell masks so evocative of Islander cultures and histories. 

One result of more than a century of colonial intrusions into Islanders’ relationships with turtle has been to remove the masks from the islands and from Islander contexts, disrupting social relationships in the Torres Strait and surrounding the masks with colonising story. Today, many of these masks sit in museums in Australia, England, and elsewhere, having been taken by a succession of colonial visitors and collectors. In these museums, with this provenance, the masks have historically been made to speak of social dissolution, of inexorable processes of loss forming a backdrop to the salvage expeditions that gathered them up.

Alice Te Punga Somerville describes the often painful practice of clearing away the accumulated junk of colonial storytelling to catch a glimpse of an alternative future, of a place that ‘allows your people to live in it’. Masked Histories shows us what happens when the story of turtle begins with that glimpse, pushing aside colonial stories conducive to extraction and dispossession in favour of stories of strength and relationship. The book opens with a sensitive and fraught account of two meetings with turtle shell masks now in the British Museum. Picture Alick Tipoti, a Badu artist, dressed formally in a suit for the occasion but taken back, on arrival, to find that the masks were disconcertingly mixed and set out in a research lab. How to approach this jumble of masks of different kinds from different places? In the same room, Lui-Chivizhe had a different encounter, one mediated by her relationship with the masks as both Islander and research student. Following family advice, she introduced herself to the masks before studying them from all angles, examining them under light, measuring, sketching, noting, photographing. Then she thanked the masks and said goodbye.