New board members at ABR

At its recent Annual General Meeting, ABR welcomed two new board members, both of them long associated with the magazine.

Professor Lynette Russell is a pre-eminent anthropological historian whose distinguished contributions to her field have been recognised with an ARC Professorial Fellowship (2011–16) and a current ARC Laureate Professorship (2020–25). Among the many leadership roles she holds, Professor Russell is presently Director of Monash University’s Indigenous Studies Centre. Lynette Russell guest-edited ABR’s Indigenous issue in 2019 and will do so again in November 2023.

Geordie Williamson is a Pascall Prize-winning literary critic and publisher, and the author of The Burning Library. Geordie has been The Australian’s longstanding chief literary critic, and is presently Publisher at Large at Picador. He has been a prolific ABR contributor since 2001.

In welcoming our new board members, Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR), remarked:

Over the past several years we have continued to renew and refresh our Board, and I am so pleased to be welcoming two new Board members to our ranks as a part of this ongoing process. We are immensely fortunate to welcome Professor Lynette Russell AM and Geordie Williamson to our Board, both frequent contributors to the magazine whose writing and contributions to our broader culture are well known. I know we will benefit enormously from their experience and expertise.

Literary festivals galore

Australians’ public romance with writers’ festivals shows no sign of souring. Is there a hamlet in our equivalent of Hertfordshire that doesn’t platform writers in congenial settings?

Now we have a new one on the tony Mornington Peninsula. Corrie Perkin – former journalist and bookseller – is Director of the Sorrento Writers Festival, which will run from April 27 to 30. Perkin has recruited a stellar line-up for her first festival. Speakers include Marcia Langton on the Voice, Janes Harper, Larissa Behrendt, Kerry O’Brien, and Peter Doherty. Bizarre as it seems, Peter Rose (beanie and all?) will be ‘Talking Footy’ (28 April) with Eddie McGuire, Mike Sheahan, and Caroline Wilson.

Meanwhile, ABR regular and board member Beejay Silcox has taken over the reins as Artistic Director at the Canberra Writers Festival. Beejay brings verve, polish, and flair to everything she undertakes. Her first festival will run from 16 to 20 August.

Adelaide Tour

ABR’s recent Adelaide Festival tour, conducted in association with Academy Travel, was a big hit. This sold-out tour, led by Peter Rose and Christopher Menz, took in some remarkable theatre, notably the searing, confronting A Little Life, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s adaptation of Hanya Yanagihara’s novel of the same name, directed by Ivo van Hove, a veteran of the Adelaide Festival. For many, Ramsey Nasr’s performance as Jude (a role soon to be played by James Norton in the new English-language version, in London) was unforgettable. Equally memorable was the Belarus Free Theatre’s Dogs of Europe, based on the novel by Alhierd Bacharevič. This was inspired, timely, biting, hilarious theatre.

Members of the Belarus Free Theatre unfurl an anti-Putin banner after Dogs of Europe.

The tour took us to Ukaria, that oasis of chamber music in the Adelaide Hills. The occasion was the world première of Ngapa William Cooper, written and composed by Lior, Nigel Westlake, Lou Bennett, and Sarah Gory. This beautiful, anthemic new song cycle commemorates the life and activism of Yorta Yorta elder William Cooper, who in 1938 led members of the Australian Aborigines League on an eight-mile walk to the German Consulate in Melbourne after Kristallnacht, perhaps the sole non-Jewish protest anywhere in the world after that horrific event in Germany. Graham Strahle reviews the second performance, which took place at the Adelaide Town Hall in ABR Arts.

The curtain call after Ngapa William Cooper at Ukaria.

At a private reception with the tour party, Ruth McKenzie, the new artistic director of the Adelaide Festival, impressed us with her genuine interest in people’s responses to the program (which she inherited from departing directors Rachel Healy and Neil Armfield), and dropped hints about a major opera component in her next few festivals. This gladdened the heart of operamanes in the party, including our Editor.

The impressive box-office result indicates that the Adelaide Festival has well and truly regained its mantle as Australia’s premier arts festival.

During Writers’ Week, ABR co-hosted its annual party with the Australian Society of Authors, which is celebrating its sixtieth birthday this year (ours was in 2021). Despite the unwontedly cool weather which drove us into the tent, this was a rousing success. Visiting UK Poet Laureate Simon Armitage joined us and was promptly surrounded by young local poets. Advances forbore to ask the amiable Yorkshireman what he had made of one of his early sessions, ‘Simon Armitage and Friends’, haphazardly chaired by Sarah Ferguson, who was one of many ABC personalities featured in the program.

The Jaguar

What a time Sarah Holland-Batt is having on the prize front, as in many other spheres. Within a week, her third collection, The Jaguar, was shortlisted for the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry (NSW) and longlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most lucrative prizes for a single book of poetry (it is currently worth C$130,000).

The Jaguar also appears on the 2023 Stella Prize longlist, along with eleven other books, including works by Fiona Kelly McGregor, Tracey Lien, and Louisa Lim. (One remarkable omission from the longlist was Fiona McFarlane’s luminous novel The Sun Walks Down, an early favourite for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.)

The Stella shortlist is due on 30 March, after we go to press, and the winner (who receives $50,000) will be named in April.

Prize entrants

In recent years, thousands of writers have entered our three literary prizes: the Peter Porter Poetry Prize (first offered in 2005), the Calibre Essay Prize (2007), and the Jolley (2010).

Recently, we polled entrants to find out what drew them to the prizes, how they found the process, what they thought of the present division of prize moneys between shortlisted authors, and how we might improve the prizes. Hundreds of entrants completed the survey, and we thank them all.

The feedback was instructive – very supportive too. We were pleased to learn, for instance, that ninety-six per cent of respondents rate our online entry process as good or excellent. Remarkably, almost seventy per cent of respondents told us that they create new works for the prizes rather than disinterring old ones. That’s thousands of new literary works being created because of Jolley, Calibre, and the Porter.

As to people’s primary motivation for entering an ABR prize, sixty per cent do so because of the prestige of that award. The second highest factor was the possibility of publication in ABR.

Last call for Jolley

Thanks to all those authors who have entered the 2023 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Entries are pouring in, half of them from abroad (to date we have entries from eighteen different countries, but this will grow; we ended up with thirty-eight countries in 2020). This says much for the international allure of the Jolley, now considered one of the major prizes for a new short story in English.

Entries close on April 24, so you have three weeks to compose an exquisite masterpiece ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Prize money totals $12,500.

Fellowship in Tasmania

On offer at present in Tasmania is an enlightened new fellowship named after one of Tasmania’s most distinguished poets: James McAuley (1917–76). The University of Tasmania, where McAuley was Professor of English from 1961 until his death, is offering the inaugural James McAuley Creative Fellowship, which will support an established poet residing in Australia to work with students and the Tasmanian community. The successful applicant will have a strong track record of professional publication. The Fellowship is worth $10,000, with a residency of two to four weeks.

Applications close on 15 April. See the website for full details.

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

A carping review

Dear Editor,

Frances Wilson is an esteemed biographer, so I looked forward to her review of Brigitta Olubas’s Shirley Hazzard: A writing life in ABR (March 2023).

I was puzzled therefore to read this sour-toned review. Frances Wilson clearly dislikes Shirley Hazzard. That’s fine, but it’s a personal animus that spoils a review of this important first biography of a major Australian novelist. Wilson quotes a critic’s view of The Great Fire (2004) as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’, but then adds the back-handed compliment, ‘which might be said of Hazzard herself’ – suggesting that Hazzard’s work has nothing to say to modern readers. She might be describing a notable but ugly piece of furniture, regretfully inherited.

The review continues in this carping strain, with a catalogue of complaints about Hazzard’s personality. Wilson notes Hazzard’s simple mistake about the title of her first New Yorker story – this prompts an accusation of ‘self-mythologising’. She disapproves of Hazzard’s double crime of marrying an older man who, moreover, is independently wealthy. (Never mind that Francis Steegmuller was a renowned biographer and scholar who twice won the National Book Award in the United States.) ‘Was the marriage a success? On one level, yes, but there were no children,’ Wilson tut-tuts.

Wilson then chides Hazzard for ‘the dreariness of name-dropping’ in her diaries, though these were private documents to record meetings, not intended for public viewing. In later life, Wilson cattily observes, Hazzard ‘disappears into her Missoni jackets and Ferragamo shoes’ (another ‘crime’, apparently). The relevance of this to Hazzard’s art eludes me.

Frances Wilson’s review does a disservice to both Shirley Hazzard and Brigitta Olubas.

Paul Morgan, South Yarra, Vic.

Frances Wilson replies:

Paul Morgan is ‘puzzled’ by my ‘sour tone’, and I am puzzled by his misreading of my review. I don’t ‘dislike’ Shirley Hazzard in the slightest; I think she was a remarkable novelist. Describing her as ‘the masterpiece of a vanished age of civility’ doesn’t in the least imply that Hazzard has nothing to say to modern readers, any more than to apply the same term to Henry James would suggest that he is now irrelevant. I can’t think how Morgan finds in that phrase the suggestion that Hazzard is an ‘ugly piece of furniture, regretfully inherited’.

Were Morgan to read Olubas’s judicious and ground-breaking biography, he would see that she does not make ‘a simple mistake’ about the title of Hazzard’s first published story in the New Yorker;  it is Olubas, not Wilson, who reveals that the story was in fact ‘Woollahra Road’ rather than ‘Harold’, and Olubas who is interested in the process of Hazzard’s ‘self-mythologising’.

I don’t disapprove in the slightest of Hazzard’s marrying an older man who was also wealthy – why on earth would I? How can Morgan possibly hear a ‘tut-tut’ in the question – again, posed by Olubas – of whether the marriage, in which Hazzard frequently described herself as unhappy, was altogether a success?

As for the lists of famous names in her diaries and her designer wardrobe, Hazzard’s polished persona as a figurehead of literary high-life is fundamental to Brigitta Olubas’s study.  

Nearly fifty years ago, when President Lyndon Johnson decided to begin scaling down Washington’s disastrous war in Vietnam, the Australian Minister for the Air, Peter Howson, confided to his diary that ‘to my mind it’s the first step of the Americans moving out of Southeast Asia and … within a few years, there’ll be no white faces on the Asian mainland’.

Johnson’s decision, followed by Richard Nixon’s statement in July 1969 on the tiny Pacific island of Guam that the United States would never again get involved in a land war in Asia, seemed to spell American withdrawal from the region, or, as the then head of External Affairs in Canberra put it, from ‘West of Hawaii’.

It was geopolitical shorthand that sent shivers down the spine of officials, especially coming so soon after the British government’s decision to wind back its military presence in Asia, or what London referred to as ‘East of Suez’. One local newspaper likened Whitehall’s decision to the serving of a ‘Far East death warrant’. Taken together, it appeared that Canberra’s Cold War nirvana – having its ‘great and powerful friends’ engaged in the region to keep the threat of Asian communism as far away as possible – was coming to an end. Australia was on its own. It would have to fend for itself as never before.

As the record shows, it did.

When it was clear in the 1970s that neither Europe nor the United States offered Australia a sense of security, the country energetically embraced the countries and cultures of Asia in a new way. The process had its agonies – who can forget Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew’s warning in 1980 that Australia was destined to be the ‘poor white trash of Asia’ – but it also prompted a period of as yet unrivalled creative Australian diplomacy.

Michael Mandelbaum’s book The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy is intended as another instalment, the author argues (quoting Pieter Geyl), in history’s ‘argument without end’. Historians of US foreign policy have long been engaged in their own particular argument – mostly, a competition over naming rights. In the most prestigious instalments – and Mandelbaum’s contribution is certainly one of those – the argument is not so much over the substance of history, but over its categorisation.

Mandelbaum’s contribution, in this regard, is what he describes as a ‘new framework’ for the history of American foreign policy. Mandelbaum breaks that history into four ascending temporal categories: the first, when the United States was a ‘Weak Power’, covers 1765–1865, and includes the road to independence, the American Revolution, and the Civil War. The second, when the US is described as a ‘Great Power,’ covers 1865–1945, and includes World Wars I and II. The third, ‘Superpower’, covers 1945–90 and the duration of the Cold War. Finally, the United States’ reign as global ‘Hyper-power’ covers 1990–2015, and includes the rise of the so-called New World Order, the Gulf Wars, and the War on Terror.

These categories are indeed a ‘new framework’ for the history of the United States in the world. They are convincing and logical. They are also entirely uncontroversial and conventional. Perhaps more importantly, Mandelbaum’s new framework is representative of that ‘argument without end’ in US foreign policy history; a rush to name, to categorise, that is less scholarly than an attempt both to make abstract and to justify the violent, material consequences of the exercise of American power and the ideologies that drive it.

All nations are sustained by myth-making, but some myths are more problematic than others. Australia has long taken heart from the myth of Anzac, the story that in their ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli, in 1915, Australian men gave birth to the nation. Notably militarist in orientation, extolling the feats of men at war, extensive government investment has helped render our national creation myth sacrosanct. Thus, when Alan Tudge, a former Coalition minister for Education and Youth, contemplated suggested changes in the national history curriculum in 2021, he declared that the school curriculum must never present Anzac as a ‘contested idea’. Anzac Day was ‘the most sacred day in the Australian calendar’.

The importance of contesting historical myth is precisely the purpose of a new collection of essays about American history, edited by Princeton professors Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer. Avowedly political in intention, Myth America: Historians take on the biggest legends and lies about our past brings together twenty essays on assorted ‘myths’ relating to a wide variety of subjects, including the American creation myth, the drafting of the Constitution (was Madison really so important or was Washington ‘the man’?), American exceptionalism ( a term invented in the 1920s), the nature of feminism (is it really anti-family?), and ‘the vanishing Indian’ (did indigenous peoples simply disappear or were they dispossessed and destroyed?).

There are also chapters on American socialism, the civil rights movement, the New Deal, immigration (‘they keep on coming’), Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause, voter fraud, and various other topics, but none relating to military history or Americans’ fighting prowess. The War of Independence is ignored in favour of the drafting of the Constitution while the Civil War is mentioned only in terms of its political legacies (‘Confederate Monuments’, ‘The Southern Strategy’). The Vietnam War is discussed, not in relation to its battles but apropos of alleged government betrayal of veterans and the rise of white power movements.

Janet Malcolm knew the difference between the remembered thing and the thing itself. Her writing life and 1984 masterpiece, In the Freud Archives, explored that crevice, asking: is what really matters how we experience life, not life itself?

This makes the photograph a curious thing: its captured details seem to prove memory. An immaculately groomed, smiling mother cradles her wriggling, blurry one-year-old, her gaze still with love. This photograph of Malcolm and her mother, which opens a chapter in Still Pictures, shows that her mother had an ‘exuberance and vivacity and warmth’. But it disguises the thing which undercut their lives. ‘Her mind was elsewhere. This is what I can’t get hold of.’

Concealment functioned as a survival strategy within this otherwise ‘happy’ family, Malcolm explains. She was five when they migrated to New York from Czechoslovakia in 1939, but only after the war was she told that she was Jewish.

Still Pictures is the last of thirteen books Malcolm wrote before her death in 2021 at the age of eighty-six. Twenty-six pieces – each stimulated by a photograph – follow her friend Ian Frazier’s Introduction, written in shock ten weeks after Malcolm’s death: ‘my sense of carrying on an interrupted conversation … remains so strong’. An Afterword from the author’s daughter Anne Malcolm sits in place of a final chapter, its wisdom and steady pace so like her mother’s, indeed like Malcolm’s own mother’s, it is clear that Malcolm’s death was no annulment of life, on or off the page.

‘If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember.’

Elizabeth Hardwick, Sleepless Nights

I first went to New York City in January 1975. It was wonderfully dilapidated. There was a blizzard of sorts, but I had the light jacket I had bought in Athens. If it was cold, I didn’t notice. The morning I arrived, there was a particularly gory pack murder on the subway. I read about it in the Times. So I avoided the subway and walked everywhere, through the sludge. We all knew what happened if you strayed into Central Park. Folks in Columbus, Ohio, where I had been staying with friends, had implored me not to visit New York. They couldn’t imagine why a nice young boy from somewhere called Melbourne – anarchically long hair and freakish wardrobe notwithstanding – wanted to visit that sinful city. (Still missing Nixon, they spoke of sin and sodomy.) I stayed in Midtown, in a grungy hotel soon to be demolished. The old black-and-white TV was on a constant loop, but I followed The Dick Cavett Show as best I could. The louvred door to my room cast terrifying shadows over my bed whenever anyone passed my room. Each night I dreamt that an ogre was on his way from Wall Street to stab me to death. In the morning I had breakfast for 99 cents – or, if I was hungry, $1.99. Then I didn’t eat for the rest of the day. I haunted the grand old bookshops that lined Fifth Avenue in those days. I visited the Metropolitan Museum for the warmth, but I didn’t know about the Frick. Velvet Underground wasn’t playing at the Metropolitan Opera, so I skipped that. During my stay in New York I didn’t speak to a soul, which suited me fine. It was the purpose of my visit.

It is unlikely that Darryl Pinckney – twenty-one then, still relatively new to Manhattan himself, an outsider because of his race and sexuality – ever went for more than fifteen minutes without conversing with someone of consequence, whether literary, artistic, theatrical, bohemian (he moved in all these spheres). Often it was Elizabeth Hardwick, as he relates in this tender, quirky memoir of their unlikely friendship.

It began in 1973 when Pinckney, a student at Columbia raised in Indiana, joined Hardwick’s creative writing course at Barnard College. During his interview he had confided that his roommate had threatened to kidnap Harriet, Hardwick’s daughter with Robert Lowell, if she didn’t enrol him. Somehow it worked.

Pinckney, though gauche, tried to be formal at first. ‘Professor Hardwick was fresh and put together. Her soft appearance made the tough things she said even funnier.’ He ventured into ‘an education of sympathies’ – first as her student, then as a visitor to her apartment on West Sixty-Seventh Street, dogsbody, reader of drafts, emptier of the dishwasher, companion, secretary, fact-checker, drinking partner, walker, fellow gossip – even shrink in a way.

Shannon Molloy’s 2020 memoir, Fourteen, recounted a childhood and adolescence of grisly homophobic violence. Yet many readers of that book – a bestseller, adapted for the stage and optioned for a film production – may find You Made Me This Way noteworthy in part because it reveals what Fourteen left out: the sexual abuse Molloy suffered, beginning at age five, at the hands of an older boy. This omission underscores one of the book’s central theses, that on average male victims of child sexual abuse find it harder than female victims to disclose their experiences. A conditioned reticence with grave implications – ‘[t]here is death in secrecy’. Molloy’s book, a hybrid of autobiography and journalism, takes socially important steps in assessing – and humanising – these implications.

The sociologist Arthur Frank uses the term ‘restitution story’ to describe the dominant Western model for writing about ill-ness, invested in ‘restoring the sick person to the status quo ante’. You Made Me This Way reads, at one level, as such a story. ‘Who can I blame,’ Molloy asks, ‘for being the way I am?’ Elsewhere, referring to male survivors in general: ‘We are this way for a reason. If I know what that reason is, can I somehow figure out a way to heal?’ And again: ‘there’s a new drive to try to fix myself’. Structurally, Molloy frames the book’s interviews with other survivors, its array of evidence affirming the adverse impacts of child sexual abuse in adulthood, and its consultations with experts in several fields as an attempt to alleviate his own psychological suffering. What makes this structure so powerful, and Molloy’s testimony so affecting, is how it reveals the core weakness of the restitution story, and the danger of cleaving to it: an urge to simplify and render static what is, particularly in chronic pain, complex and dynamic.

Publishers rarely become big news in Australia, university presses even less often. It was notable therefore that the departure in early 2019 of Melbourne University Publishing’s CEO, Louise Adler, and some members of the MUP board, became a matter on which so many of the nation’s political and cultural élite felt they needed to have an opinion. A strong coterie came out in her defence. This had much to do with Adler herself, who had courted their attention, published their books, and made MUP a story in its own right.

Adler also attracted opponents of her supposed turn to the commercial and popular. The critics saw seven-figure university subsidies were going in one end, with five and occasionally six-figure advances heading out the other, often on titles that they believed fell short in terms of either intellectual or commercial value. That said, Adler – on many criteria – had made a success of her role in the difficult times following the Global Financial Crisis. Kells, though not complimentary about Adler’s financial performance, remains broadly sympathetic. She had some triumphs in the early years, such as The Latham Diaries (2005), and several titles generated considerable media attention. MUP’s financial position also improved after some cost-cutting measures following a 2012 review. For all the criticism that suggested otherwise, Adler went on publishing work by academics.

The ‘walk-out’ – as Stuart Kells calls it in the title of a chapter in his centenary history of MUP – became an occasion for mutual insult, especially between journalists and academics. A few politicians-turned-authors – mainly unhampered by any understanding of academic publishing – also weighed in. The journalists and politicians did not hold back in alleging that prominent in the shadows were envious, resentful, out-of-touch inhabitants of the ivory tower. In academic circles, the phrase ‘airport trash’ was thrown around, alongside references to books by or about underworld identities, socialites, celebrities, politicians, and even the occasional politician’s spouse.

This is not your life said the sushi train,

but this is what happened, illusion and voyaging,

all of it episodic-like, muted, a dantological trajectory,

advancing as a nebula of mental life.

Your guide appearing as a figure

from a pack of dreams, a guy who looked like Brecht,

and who only ever does what he wants,

munching a cigar, telling the clouds how to process.

But he was gentle, worried about you.

because you were adrift. So he led you down

through your story, your souvenir, its sandy tracks

and banks of everlastings, its barren ledges of intention

past the muttering of screened crowds. You missed

the entrance, distracted as usual, that eternal sense

of hiding things from yourself. He said just follow me,

don’t take any notice of that witchery of sound.

There are endless meanings in this geography,

lives streaked with occasions and things they didn’t invite.

Anyway everyone has sundowner issues.

Or a brow ache, or memories that are an obstruction.

It’s an armselig path this kind of travel,

but look at those bright red kangaroo paws,

think about what you might be able to offer.

The limit of your experience isn’t a limit, it’s mutable,

happily for you this is just a juncture. An induced waypoint,

which is not to say you’ll forget. For me, I’m not sure.

But get to know the intimacy of the alphabet, I think of it

as microdosing knowledge, googling corrections. And look around,

there’s a lot of value in distortions and damage, they can go with you.

I can help you with form, and with the visualisation bit.

I’ll see you in the marshy reed beds when you’re free, or freer,

on your way out. I’ve got an Airstream near there

where I hang out the rest of the time.

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

Coming in at 3,140 pages spread over four chunky volumes and featuring essays by 181 contributors, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Literary Theory is in every sense a weighty articulation of the state of literary criticism in the early twenty-first century. In their famous Encyclopédie (1751–66), Diderot and d’Alembert promulgated the virtues of consolidating new know-ledge in the public domain, rather than leaving the intellectuals who were responsible for the development of such expertise isolated in their academic cloisters. Looking back self-consciously to this distinguished predecessor, John Frow, in his Introduction, acknowledges a tension between the encyclopedist’s instinct to reproduce conventional categories, instead of risking the introduction of new research that might upset conceptual applecarts, and the desire of ambitious editors to frame these topics in a progressive rather than ossified manner. Hence Frow cites his instructions to contributors as inviting authors ‘to make their own arguments about the topic rather than (just) describing existing treatments of it’, adding: ‘In this way many of our articles may diverge from what readers would expect to see out of a traditional encyclopedia entry.’

For the most part, this strategy is spectacularly successful. The range of topics covered here is extraordinary – from ‘Lyric Poetry and Poetics’ to ‘Hypertext Theory’, from ‘Chinese Literary Theory’ to ‘Modern Manuscripts’ – and the standard of these individual contributions is very high indeed. Each entry judiciously positions itself in relation to existing and emerging work in the field, and this Encyclopedia is likely to be of more interest to scholars and general readers than most of the volumes in (for example) Cambridge University Press’s ‘Cambridge Companions’ series, whose business model involves trading on the authority of established scholars to rapidly synthesise current scholarship for the benefit of hard-pressed undergraduates.

Frow’s own piece on authorship, for example, fills a dense twenty-three pages, with a full bibliography of further reading. He also makes the point in his Introduction that each of these essays was subject to external review as well as approval by the editors, thereby enhancing the quality control associated with a rigorous peer review process. The wide range of distinguished contributors here is particularly impressive, and strikingly unusual for a collection of this kind. Frow explains how this is intended to be ‘a dynamic project … [and] its online version will continue to expand and to be revised’, with these volumes on literary theory being ‘a component of a much larger project, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature’, coordinated by Paula Rabinowitz at the University of Minnesota. It is clear that Frow and his editorial team have taken pains to avoid creating a desiccated resource destined to collect dust on library shelves, and that they have deliberately built into this project a capacity to change and evolve over time.

Reading Ashley Killar’s compelling biography, Cranko: The man and his choreography, feels like studying the modernisation of ballet in three countries, the way ballet eats up lives as often as it forms families of peers and lovers, and the unending devotion required for creativity to flourish. It is pleasing to learn how a determined man with an ever-rattling mind, backed by a calm, philosophical manager, could challenge opera house dominance to make the Stuttgart Ballet an independent entity, with its own school supported by a philanthropic institution named after the city’s first ballet master of the 1750s, Jean-Georges Noverre, whom David Garrick called ‘the Shakespeare of the dance’.

John Cranko’s primary concern was for ballet to be as alive as anything Shakespeare put on stage, and that’s how, during Stuttgart Ballet’s Australian tour in 1974, critics saw his two big ballets, The Taming of the Shrew (Scarlatti) and Onegin (Tchaikovsky-Stolze), as well as short works Jeu de Cartes (Stravinsky), Brouillards (Debussy), and Act Two of Swan Lake. A fourth ballet, Voluntaries (Poulenc), was created by guest artist Glen Tetley to honour Cranko, who had died on a flight back to Germany after a successful US tour in 1973, aged forty-five. Although Romeo and Juliet and Onegin remain in the Australian Ballet’s repertoire, Stuttgart Ballet has never returned to Australia.

Born in South Africa, Cranko was one of the most adventurous choreographers to graduate from London’s Royal Ballet School after World War II. A precocious child enthralled by music – such as Stravinsky’s Firebird, which his parents saw in London danced by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1924 – he made puppets so cleverly that he was given a theatre for marionettes, for which he sewed colourful costumes by hand. Innately theatrical, imaginative, and mercurial, he was determined to make narrative ballets. His first was The Soldier’s Tale, inspired by Stravinsky’s 1918 score, made for the Capetown Ballet Club. He was just seventeen, and away from his Johannesburg home was exposed to a world of artists, gay bars, and camp chatter.

Back in the early 1980s, when I was working in Canberra as a public servant in an open-plan office, I obtained a doctor’s certificate declaring that I was allergic to cigarette smoke. I wasn’t – not at least in any strict medical sense. I was merely a healthy non-smoker who found being enveloped in clouds of second-hand cigarette smoke distressing and unpleasant.

The doctor’s letter was my final gambit in the ceaseless campaign to keep my hair, lungs, and clothes smoke-free. At the time, I was following the case of a man just over the other side of the Parliamentary Triangle, a Department of Finance employee who was attempting to sue the Department for damage to his health from passive smoking at work. He did not fare well. Reading between the lines of the newspaper reports, I inferred that this plaintiff was being edged, by the public service legal team and by accommodating journalists, into the Nutters’ Corner – a place from which every grievance of his was further proof of his craziness.

My fate, following my grizzles and my doctor’s letter, was not so grim, but I am sure my cigarette ‘allergy’ resulted in my file being marked ‘Not to be Promoted’. Not that it mattered – I got out of there and eventually set my own workplace health standards as a self-employed person – but the faint sense of being an oversensitive pariah still haunts me.

This may seem fantastical to younger readers, but people – something like half of the adult community – used to smoke everywhere. Practically the only place you could be free from smoke was in your own home. Smokers smoked in cinemas and restaurants. They smoked at work, in meetings, in university tutorials. They smoked on planes and in taxis, buses, and trains. One therapist I used to consult puffed away on his pipe during our sessions.

Public smoking made the lives of many non-smokers miserable and socially difficult. I rarely ate out, except when refusing an invitation would ostracise me altogether. I never set foot inside a pub, never went to clubs or discos. I made a pill of myself by asking people not to smoke in meetings and tutorials (a request not always granted). I avoided befriending people who smoked. In response to the doctor’s allergy letter, my desk was moved an awkward distance away from the rest of my team.

Smoking bans in planes and workplaces began in the late 1980s in Australia, and by the early noughties finally extended to restaurants and cafés. After decades of struggle, the rights of those who impinged on the health and comfort of others in public places were finally put where they belonged – secondary to the rights of everyone else to a safe environment.

So why am I reliving all this now? Simply because I recently found myself fantasising about going to my doctor and asking for a letter claiming that I am neurodivergent and that I require a quietish environment. In the first instance, this letter would be trotted into the gym I attend, where the music has sometimes reached 95 decibels (I measured it one day on my iPhone). My requests for the music to be turned down have been utterly unsuccessful. I can see that I may have to fall back on my old strategy of falsely claiming a medical condition.

As a society, we have finally understood the importance of protecting our lungs, only to accept an increasing assault on our ears. Hearing must be pretty much the least valued and least protected of all our bodily faculties.

Noise is the new cigarette smoke. The most obvious potential fallout of this carelessness is hearing damage caused by sheer volume. You probably have a smartphone with a decibel meter. Here is a thumbnail sketch of the everyday meaning of a decibel (dB) count, remembering that the decibel scale is logarithmic, so that for every three points of increase in the scale, the volume doubles. A refrigerator hum is around 40 dB. Normal conversation is around 60 dB (though I suspect this may underestimate Australians’ propensity to shout). A petrol-driven lawnmower is 80-85 dB and a motorbike 95 dB. A car horn at five metres, or an approaching subway train, is 100 dB. Beyond this level you are into entertainment venues, sirens, and firecrackers, where hearing loss can begin within five minutes.

Most restaurants these days operate in the 85-95 dB range – that is, you are eating and trying to talk beside a lawnmower or a motorbike. At this level, damage to hearing is likely within two hours. That’s a bad thing to do to your customers; it should be an illegal thing to do to your staff, who are there for up to eight hours a day.

It appears that neither the hospitality industry nor WorkSafe is taking this on as a public health challenge. My research, courtesy of Dr Google, suggests that the best the hospitality industry could do was to recommend that because restaurants were often in breach of the noise guidelines set out by several WorkCover authorities, the solution was to change the guidelines. In 2011, Restaurant and Catering Australia lodged a submission with Safe Work Australia recommending that the maximum average noise level in their workplaces should be lifted from 85 dB to 100 dB. Given the noise levels at some restaurants I have visited recently, Safe Work Australia seems to have acceded to this suggestion.

The other aspect of noise that is rarely discussed is its effect on mental health. Even if ambient noise in public is not sufficiently loud to damage hearing, it can chafe and corrode the soul. Shrill vocal music in supermarkets. Commercial radio in the GP’s waiting room. Commercial television in hospital waiting rooms. Restaurant music piped into the street (which, by my reading of EPA guidelines, is illegal). Television screens and loud pop music in restaurants. Inane, high-voltage music or talkback radio inflicted on paying taxi occupants. Thumping, repetitive electronic music in the airport lounge. Commercial radio in the local florist shop. And the last bastion – bookshops like Readings. During a recent visit, I was regaled by loud doof-doof.

Why has the world become so addicted to background noise? When did music morph from something we listened to consciously, with full attention, to something akin to aural chewing gum? How did it become an experience deprived of flavour and meaning, a stimulus functioning only as compulsive, non-nutritive matter?

I find myself becoming exhausted and irritated by my forays into public places. I can’t wait to get home and escape into blissful quiet or go for a long walk away from it all, where the only singing is that of the wind and birds.

A recent conversation with a young gym instructor cast some light on this state of affairs. I had gone up to him to ask whether the loud music could be turned down. He said people needed to be spurred on by loud music. I said this was not true of all of us, and anyway, modern technology provided the perfect solution – people who wanted loud music could bring their own ear pods and smartphone and listen to their own choice and volume of ‘motivation’. The gym instructor then delivered his killer argument: you couldn’t have a gym without background music. Earlier that week he had arrived at work to find that someone had forgotten to put the sound system on when the gym opened. The only things to be heard were small flurries of conversation and the whoosh and thump of machines and weights. It was eerie, he said. Eerie. I sensed the existential dread he must have experienced as he fumbled for the play button.

That’s it, isn’t it? We have unwittingly created a world in which we are giving up on the more austere pleasure of navigating silence and have opted instead for constant aural bread and circuses. Sadly, I can see several impediments to a prompt resolution to this problem. First, the causes of this fear/desire are more subtle and unconscious than is the case with nicotine addiction. Second, corporate interest in our remaining thus enthralled is more widely and less clearly shared than in the case of tobacco companies and smoking – making it harder to resist. 

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund. 

We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?

Chris Wallace is a shrewd and experienced political journalist; an accomplished biographer with previous works on Germaine Greer, John Hewson, and Don Bradman; and now an academic. This book draws on her PhD thesis. That breadth of experience is significant: she presents an innovative argument, is diligent about archival research and direct engagement with those about whom she is writing, and her lively and accessible style and gift for telling anecdotes will win a wide readership.

Her argument is that contemporary political biography – that is, work published while its subject is still active – can constitute a political intervention that might make or break a politician. She was driven to this realisation by reflecting on the potentially adverse influence of a biography of Julia Gillard she was near to completing while Gillard was still prime minister. It was never intended as an attack biography, yet Wallace became convinced that her analysis of Gillard’s gifts and all too human flaws would be filleted by opponents looking for negatives to amplify their already fierce denigration of Gillard. So, she abandoned the project, and returned her publishing advance.

In early March 2023, Tanya Plibersek fronted an audience at the Australian National University to question historian Chris Wallace about her newly released account of twentieth-century prime ministers and their biographers. Coming shortly before the publication of Margaret Simons’s biography of her, Plibersek’s interest in the dynamics of writing about a living, breathing, vote-seeking politician seemed prompted by more than mere professional courtesy. ‘It’s like building a golem, in the shape of a person, in a way, isn’t it?’ she remarked. ‘And then you’re putting magic into it and animating it. It comes out of the mud.’

Simons has considerable experience working with such mud and magic. In addition to writing about gardening, she is a biographer of Penny Wong and Kerry Stokes, a profiler of Mark Latham, co-writer of Malcolm Fraser’s memoirs, and investigator of the Murray–Darling Basin, the Hindmarsh Island affair, and problems in contemporary journalism. Whether at feature or book length, Simons’s writing is thoughtful, welcoming of complexity, and attuned to questions of ethics and power. In this as in many of her other books, Simons eschews a god-like omniscience and foregrounds her presence as narrator, detailing subjective reactions, making sharp observations, and moving seamlessly between events deep in the past, and how they are understood and related in the present. In doing so, Simons constructs a golem of considerable and attractive substance. Her Plibersek is diligent, hard-working, and, if not a visionary, then undeniably a consummate professional.

Born in Sydney, the third child of Slovenian immigrants who came to Australia in the postwar years, Plibersek absorbed the typical ideals of first-generation migrant children: a sense of responsibility, a keen work ethic, and a patriotism that obliged her, in exchange for enjoying the rewards of this country, to give back to it and her community.

'Australia faces the real prospect of a war with China within three years that could involve a direct attack on our mainland.’ That was the opening line of a 2,174-word article – headlined ‘Australia “must prepare” for threat of China war’ and tagged with a ‘Red Alert’ graphic – that ran on the front pages of The Age and Sydney Morning Herald on 7 March. Next day, the authors of the ‘Red Alert’ special, journalists Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, ran a 2,241-word hypothetical about how a conflict over Taiwan could, within seventy-two hours, result in missile bombardments and cyberattacks against Australia. On the third day, Hartcher and Knott’s ‘Red Alert’ special concluded with a 2,278-word front-page piece on the steps that Australia needed to take to prepare for war with China.

The basis for the special’s alarming conclusions were the ruminations of a panel of five ‘experts’ brought together by Hartcher and Knott to ‘blow away the fog of war to give Australians some critical points of insight’.

More like the flogs of war. As Greg Barns pointed out in Pearls and Irritations, former public servant John Menadue’s online public policy journal, the ‘gang of five experts’ were not Sinophiles but instead had strong connections to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, which are backed by arms makers. Barns’s key point was that Hartcher and Knott presented the panel’s pro-war findings without disclosing their defence industry connections. ‘The community,’ Barns wrote, ‘should be able to make an informed judgement about the prognostications of this group of experts.’

I won’t detail the welter of criticism ‘Red Alert’ received, but recommend googling former prime minister Paul Keating’s evisceration, which includes the extraordinary accusation that the Nine newspapers refused to run his rebuttal of their 6,693-word omnibus. Keating’s comments were happily run by other media outlets, including The Australian and the Guardian.

Whether or not you have read literary critic Harold Bloom, you have likely heard the term ‘anxiety of influence’, coined in his 1970s book of the same name. There and in The Western Canon (1994), Bloom proposes a vision of creativity inspired by Freud, the Romantics, and the Ancient Greeks, in which great men throughout history wrestle one another for poetic supremacy. Creative production is a violent, Oedipal struggle in which only a ‘strong’ poet can overcome the influence of his forebear. And yes, it is almost always a ‘him’. In The Western Canon, only four women in history make the cut in a list of twenty-six, mostly English-language, writers whom Bloom deems central to Western civilisation (Shakespeare, Proust, Beckett, etc.). My nit-picking would no doubt have annoyed Bloom, who rankled at what he called the School of Resentment – feminist, Marxist, and race studies scholars who kept tampering with the canon in the name of social justice. For him, aesthetic value transcends these concerns and can be objectively assessed. Some people (almost always male) are simply geniuses.

Bloom died in 2019 so we can only guess his take on Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho, a novel which weaves together fictionalised biographies of real-life, queer, feminist writers, artists, and activists – some famous, others not – who clustered in Europe around the turn of the twentieth century. Pitting her novel against centuries of systemic gatekeeping, erasure, and violence, Schwartz has eyes on the canon. By weaving historical events and legal texts into fiction, After Sappho exposes how the patriarchy has erected its narrow canon in law and in literature and then defended itself as if it were already there, the natural order.

Like her masculine predecessors, Schwartz is well versed in the classics. She diverges from their path with knowing glee, however, to revel in influence as an immersive experience. After Sappho creates a vision of creative, sexual, and romantic connection between women that is as lush and joyful as it is enraged by men’s violence.

Sasha Soldatow was a writer, gay activist, member of the Sydney Push, party animal, and bon vivant with legions of friends. In Drink Against Drunkenness, Inez Baranay maps the life like an archaeologist’s dig, though we are looking into the recent past (Soldatow died in 2006, not yet sixty). A fall in the icy streets of Moscow, in which his hip was broken and subsequently badly reset, heralded a steep decline; his alcoholism grew apace, and many of his friends tired of him. It was a sad end, yet he had a life full of daring: avant-garde writing and living freely as a gay man in a still repressive age.

Soldatow was born in Germany of Russian parents who were intent on leaving Europe. His first memories were of the famous Bonegilla migrant camp. A Melbourne boy, he grew up with a fearsomely dominating mother. He escaped to Sydney, where he quickly found his niche in the Sydney Push, despite its uber-macho feel. He was already an anarchist. Even Push men fell for his insouciant charm, and Push women welcomed him with open arms. That’s where I first met him. He soon counted David Marr, Margaret Fink, Wendy Bacon, and later, Christos Tsiolkas among his intimate friends, as well as a wide circle of filmmakers, activists, poets, and writers such as Pam Brown, joanne burns, and the publisher–bookseller Nicholas Pounder. He also kept many Melbourne lifelong friends, among them Judith Brett and George Papaellinas.

Soldatow was immensely likeable, with a silly, infectious giggle. Always interested and curious, he took his friendships seriously. He was also erudite, arrogant, an unashamed sponger, and someone who craved public acknowledgment of his talent and learning. He lived his life as if he were waiting for his biographer, documenting everything, making copies of his copious letters. Baranay has done him proud. Her biography is a mosaic that fits the pieces together to reveal an original and varied life.

Stephanie Bishop’s The Anniversary is an example of both deft literary craft and an engrossing read – a feat rarer than it should be. Billed as a ‘novel about writing and desire’, this is more a work interrogating the nexus between art, celebrity, and commerce, while unpicking the ways in which gender informs all three.

JB, the narrator, is an accomplished novelist on the cusp of winning an international literary prize, and perhaps eclipsing her husband, Patrick. A celebrated film auteur, Patrick is two decades her senior and at the peak of his career. He is also her former teacher. Their art is intertwined, a joint project melding the personal and the professional in ways that cannot be separated – until, of course, they are. Given the key event of this novel can be no surprise to the reader – the blurb reveals that Patrick is lost at sea while they are celebrating their anniversary on a cruise – questions about their creativity, their reputations, and who advanced whose career more are what drive the narrative.

An ochre-coloured haze has gathered permanently over the town of Praiseworthy somewhere in the Gulf country. It is composed of dust, soot, broken butterfly wings, memories, and grief – and it isn’t going anywhere. Meanwhile, on the ground, thousands of feral donkeys are being corralled into the town cemetery by an Indigenous leader called Cause Man Steel. Most call this man Planet because he is always banging on about the collapse of the planet.

The donkeys are Cause’s scheme to secure his people’s future when the world goes to ruin. When the planet collapses there would, he reasoned, be a worldwide demand for donkeys. The millions of donkeys that flourish in Australia’s tropical savannahs, and that will work through any hardship, would become once again the transport system of peoples far and wide. Cause’s long-suffering wife, Dance, is at her wit’s end: the cemetery is on her Native Title land, and so the people blame her for the invasion of feral donkeys. And anyway, Cause is her husband. When it all gets too much, she goes out to the plains and talks to the myriad butterflies that do what they always do. Somewhere else, the spirits watch on and bide their time. This is just another day for them, and they work to their own schedule.

In recent historical fiction, women authors have explored the Australian past from a female viewpoint, as in Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves (2020), focusing on Elizabeth Macarthur, and Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, River of Dreams (2022), about Wagadhaany, an Indigenous woman from the Murrumbidgee River. As if in response to such potent novels, now comes a trio expressing historical masculinity.

In A Man of Honour (Echo Publishing, $32.99 pb, 337 pp), his first book, Simon Smith explores the experience and context of a past and notorious relative, using historical data to present the thoughts and actions of Henry O’Farrell, who, in March 1868, at Clontarf in New South Wales, shot a pistol at Alfred, duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria. The prince was badly wounded: O’Farrell was attacked and beaten by the monarchist crowd, rescued by arresting police, and executed within a month.

Smith turned from his respected career filming documentaries to research his relative, including recorded prison conversations with Henry Parkes, already Colonial Secretary, to go on to the premiership and – if not fully positive – fame. The book has notably cinematic qualities, with strong close-ups of O’Farrell’s thoughts; it cuts from scene to scene and across periods in O’Farrell’s life, especially between his sometimes difficult earlier days and the grim final sequences.

The unnamed narrator of Ronnie Scott’s second novel, Shirley, is a socially engaged thirty-something foodie from Melbourne’s inner north. She works as an internal copywriter for a health insurance company. She has an encyclopedic knowledge of the vegan-friendly bars and eateries within a five-kilometre radius of her small apartment in trendy Collingwood. She also cooks: scrambled tofu and vegan chorizo soup; Korean vegan pancakes and Cantonese soy sauce noodles; pan-fried gnocchi with blended basil and gochujang. She might wash these down with a glass of wine or whisky, or even a michelada, followed by the occasional menthol cigarette. She has been confined to her apartment alone for 262 cumulative days of lockdown (‘and the wild, long days that have fallen between them’), imposed by the Victorian government to curtail Covid-19. She also happens to be the daughter of a celebrity.

Until the age of fourteen, the narrator was raised by her single mother (then ‘a late-nineties fixture of morning and lifestyle TV’) and an entourage of assistants whom the narrator nicknamed ‘the Geralds’ after the longest serving member of staff, a seemingly ageless business-manager-cum-butler. After the mother was ‘papped’ wearing a blood-soaked coat outside her Abbotsford home (the novel takes its title from the name of the house), she left her teen daughter to the care of ‘the main Gerald’ and the rest of the staff were terminated. Moving abroad, the mother eventually landed a gig hosting an international celebrity cooking show called (fittingly) Chef on the Run, from then on styling herself as an ‘e-parent’ to her daughter.

While the terms ‘romance’ and ‘novel’ are entangled at their origins, romance novels have been traditionally disparaged as formulaic and frivolous, feminine and anti-feminist. Nevertheless, romance is the most popular genre in the world. Harlequin reportedly sells two books every second. In recent times, scholars have given the genre serious attention.

Of course, a romantic plot is hardly exclusive to genre writing. Some of the great works of world literature, from Jane Eyre (1847) to The English Patient (1992), rely for their power on romantic love – its frisson of desire and fear, its inevitable association with transgression and betrayal. Romance, in other words, is not merely fare for women readers reputedly keen to escape into hackneyed fantasies of love.

Madelaine Lucas has unashamedly described her début novel, Thirst for Salt, as a love story, though it is hardly marketed as genre fiction. There is no burly shirtless man on the cover for a start. Indeed, given that Lucas developed the novel from the story that won the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, the book invites high literary expectations. Unfortunately, those expectations, at least for this reader, were far from realised. Despite its lyrical language and its melancholy complication of the happy-ever-after plot of genre romance, Lucas’s novel – whose protagonist dreams of ‘having a baby with a man I loved and raising it together’ – is almost anachronistically conventional.  It might even be called post-feminist.

Eleanor Catton’s Birnam Wood is a thriller that, for much of its length, privileges reflection over action. Thus, when aspiring journalist Tony Gallo makes it back to his car after multiple threats to his life, does he speed away from his potential assassins in search of safety? He does not. Instead, he has a good long ponder:

He was so staggered that he started to laugh, but his laughter subsided almost at once, and in its place he felt a wave of fury and despair roll over him at the sheer inexorability of late-capitalist degradation not just of the environment, not just of civic institutions, not just of intellectual and political ideals, but worse, of his own expectations, of what he even felt was possible any more – a familiar surge of grief and helpless rage at the reckless, wasteful, soulless, narcissistic, barren selfishness of the present day, and at his own political irrelevance and impotence, and at the utter shamelessness with which his natural inheritance, his future, had been either sold or laid to waste by his parents’ generation, trapping him in a perpetual adolescence that was further heightened by the infantilising unreality of the Internet as it encroached upon, and colonised, real life – ‘real life’, Tony thought, with bitter air quotes, for late capitalism would admit nothing ‘real’ beyond the logic of late capitalism itself, having declared self-interest the only universal, and profit motive the only absolute, and deriding everything that did not serve its ends as either a contemptible weakness or a fantasy.

The prolixity, undergraduate social analysis, and choice of exposition over action are emblematic.

Birnam Wood is set around the fictional Korowai National Park on New Zealand’s South Island. A neighbouring property owned by Sir Owen and Lady Darvish is being sold to American billionaire Robert Lemoine, ostensibly so that he can build an apocalypse-proof bunker. His true purpose is the illegal mining of rare earth minerals. The property also appeals to Birnam Wood, a collective of guerrilla gardeners, as a place to grow produce. The year is 2017, immediately before the election of Jacinda Ardern.

According to its author, Who Cares? offers ‘an up-close, humane and grounded ethnographic account of life on welfare’. Eve Vincent foregrounds the perspectives of people who are subjected to ‘an endlessly reforming welfare system’. Vincent spent substantial time in the field, building relationships with her subjects, and while the history of welfare in Australia is neatly sketched and the social and political theories underpinning the study are worthy of interest, the voices of her subjects – those who live in poverty while being subjected to strict (and sometimes nonsensical) conditions – are the book’s most vital and captivating features.

The publication of Who Cares? coincides with testimonies given to the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme, which have further demonstrated that the harms inflicted by the unlawful debt recovery scheme were a product of malicious pigheadedness on the part of the federal ministers and high-ranking public servants who oversaw it. The revelations are entirely consistent with Vincent’s analysis of how welfare is administered in Australia. Vincent – Chair of Anthropology in the Macquarie School of Social Sciences - notes that social security became ‘increasingly conditional and punitive’ in the 1990s, and that the trend has persisted in this century. To be unemployed is to ‘subsist in crushing poverty, especially in major Australian cities where housing costs are steep’, but pleas to increase rates and expand access to essential resources are continually rejected.

Who Cares? focuses on people who are ‘affected by two significant recent welfare measures: the cashless debit card and a pre-employment program called ParentsNext’. In both instances, welfare assistance ‘comes with complex conditions attached, and there are financial sanctions associated with non-adherence, or alleged non-adherence’. The cashless debit card trials were introduced in Ceduna in March 2016, and were abolished by the Labor government last year. The card ‘quarantined 80 per cent of all income support payments’ and initially targeted First Nations people disproportionately. The aim was to prevent the purchase of alcohol and drugs, to limit spending on gambling and pornography, and to thereby reduce violence and other destructive behaviours. However, its impact could not be measured because necessary data was not captured before the trial. The cashless debit card was a shoddy social experiment run by people who failed to do the basics.

In 1943, of the 101 science graduates of the University of Sydney, 55.4 per cent were women. That same year at the University of Melbourne the proportion was 46.2 per cent, and by 1945 women made up 37.4 per cent of all science graduates across Australia. Given contemporary anxieties about women’s involvement in science, these statistics appear unbelievable. Yet, as Jane Carey explores in Taking to the Field, between the 1880s and the 1950s women were not only completing science degrees in notable numbers but, even outside the unusual war years, were contributing valuably to Australian science through research, teaching, and social reform.

Taking to the Field aims to ‘name’ and ‘reclaim’ these women. Across six chapters, Australia’s little-known women of science are placed into their respective arenas: as amateur natural scientists in the bush; social reformers gracing community halls and lecture theatres; and as academic women in Australia’s universities. These women, Carey contends, were ‘those who escaped the barriers that restricted other women so completely’. They were women whose social and financial mobility, family connections, and education ‘expanded their horizons’. Carey maintains that these influences – i.e. those that have supported women’s participation in science – demonstrate that there was ‘remarkably little resistance’ to their inclusion, despite our tendency to think otherwise.

This is evident in women’s involvement in the acquisition and dissemination of scientific knowledge prior to science’s professionalisation. Carey uses various colonial women, including writer and keen botanist Louisa Atkinson and amateur geologist and (later) anthropologist Georgina King, to demonstrate that gathering scientific knowledge of the Empire’s far-flung territories was considered a worthy pursuit for financially and socially mobile women in the mid-nineteenth century. Women’s early contributions to science as amateur naturalists aided colonisation by both ‘uncovering’ nature’s ‘secrets and treasures’ and assisting in the ‘quest for national identity’. This was especially important for a nation finding its feet.

In a world both foul and fallen, where delusion, death, and unassailable Dummheit seem to wait on every corner, what can poetry do that warrants our rapt attention more than every other kind of distraction? Justin Clemens voiced the common lament when he wrote, ‘No-one reads poetry anymore, there being not enough time and more exciting entertainments out there.’ The issue, he said, is ‘a materialist problem that has always proven fundamental for poets: how to compose something that, by its own mere affective powers alone, will continue to be read or recited’ (‘Being Caught dead’, Overland, 202, 2011). That clinches the dilemma rather well. And yet, entertainment or not – and effective or not in their affective power – poetry collections seem to endure as a place, of Lilliputian dimensions, to encounter other worlds and world views.

Justin Clemens

A Foul Wind traces its lineage back to a hermetic Occitan troubadour, Arnaut Daniel, whose provocative poem ‘Pus Raimons e Truc Malecx’ reads in part (the translation is unattributed), ‘Cos the trumpet’s crude and hairy / And the swamp it hides is dark’. This poem, Giorgio Agamben suggests in The End of the Poem (1999), ‘transforms a sexual prank into a poetic query’, with a trope that seems to doubly signify the anus and a break with metrical norms. Dante referred to Daniel as il miglior fabbro, the better maker. Clemens’s genre-blending fluency is likewise highly artful, formidably energetic, and incessantly coded. Some readers will relish digging up the source codes and spotting the compulsive transformations (‘Hombre Wail, / Sea Moan’s brother’, ‘Punk Fraud’, ‘Lacky’, ‘Thus Spuke Zerothruster’). Others will enjoy the Beckettian nihilist exuberance and its self-reflexive, rollicking disorder and muck:

i put me trumpet to me lips and blow

much like roland at roncevalles

but this is not navarre & there’s no Charlemagne

to send belated aid: there’s only champagne

& abominations breeding like the cane toads of Outremer

flowering to deliquescent pustules in fading night

                (‘the song of null land’)

 

Do not endure the enteritis of elocutionary ordure

a voice brayed suddenly through the half-light of the hall.

                (‘Busting stile to prolong the mechanical’s existentially

                intervallic void’)

Pip Williams was born in London, grew up in Sydney, and now lives in the Adelaide Hills. She is the author of One Italian Summer, a memoir of her family’s travels in search of the good life, which was published by Affirm Press to wide acclaim. Her first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, based on her original research in the Oxford English Dictionary archives, was published in 2020 and became an international bestseller. The Bookbinder of Jericho is her second novel and again combines her talent for historical research and storytelling.

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

The future – to see if we do better, or worse. 

What’s your idea of hell?

A party I can’t leave.

The Silk Road is not one place, nor is it a particular route for travel, trade, and cross-cultural exchange. It is an idea, and a powerful one at that, as Tim Winter’s Silk Road: Connecting histories and futures shows. The concept of the Seidenstraße was popularised by Ferdinand von Richthofen in the 1870s to define the trade routes westwards from Han China in the ancient Greco-Roman world. Since then scholars have argued for many Silk Roads over land and sea between Africa, Eurasia, and the islands around those landmasses through which goods and ideas have been exchanged for at least two millennia.

The bountiful, exotic lands of the Silk Road have been part of the Western imagination for centuries. It was as fanciful as it was dangerous, fuelling the age of exploration, and, ultimately, violent colonisation. The connection between European colonisation and a fascination for global material culture is well documented, but it is not the focus of this study.

Winter, an ARC Professorial Future Fellow at the University of Western Australia, touches on that topic in the second chapter. He shows how European treasure hunters took advantage of new rail lines into Central Asia to travel to the sites they plundered. Boxes and boxes of books, manuscripts, and objects that documented cultural exchange were sent to St Petersburg, Berlin, and London to form the nucleus of Silk Road collections. Thousands of manuscripts written in Chinese, Tibetan, Tangut, Sanskrit, Turkish, and other more obscure languages had been sealed for centuries behind a wall of ‘the Library Cave’ in the Mogao Buddhist cave complex were shipped off to European collections in the early twentieth century. The wealth of cross-cultural ideas expressed in the material culture of the Mogao caves solidified the notion of Central Asia as the crossroads of the Silk Road, and that site became the focus of interest (and plunder) for French, Japanese, and Russian archaeologists in the years that followed.

Nearly three months have passed since the new building at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) opened (3 December 2022). This summer, Sydney Modern, as the new North building by Japanese architectural firm SAANA is popularly known, has been Sydney’s main attraction and topic of conversation. Critical opinion has been mixed, and Sydney’s famous snippiness – one version of the national tendency to doubt our achievements – has been in overdrive, but the public response is clear: hundreds of thousands have visited the Gallery to take in the building, view its first exhibitions, and revel in the renewal of the Gallery’s much-loved old buildings. It’s been a triumph: ‘Sydney Modern’ is now a city landmark.

It is, quite simply, glorious. SAANA’s Pritzker Prize-winners, Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, have given the city an exceptionally beautiful setting for its contemporary cultural life that responds to, and respects, the ancient significance and historical inflections of the site. A series of intersecting pavilions seem to float down the slope from Art Gallery Road to the Harbour, all lightness and air on four physical levels, in curvilinear natural forms that have been described as ‘informal’, to quote architect Anthony Bourke. In fact, the building conforms to a complex geometry whose very different logic from the post and lintel architecture of the older AGNSW buildings, whether classical or modernist, is immediately apparent. To underscore the point: at the threshold of the new building, giant playful blue figures by Francis Upritchard cavort and clutch at the columns of the Welcome Plaza. It is a clear invitation to leave preconceptions at the door.

Art Gallery of New South Wales featuring Takashi Murakami, Japan Supernatural: Vertiginous After Staring at the Empty World Too Intensely, I Found Myself Trapped in the Realm of Lurking Ghosts and Monsters 2019 (photograph by Iwan Baan)

Inside, the diagonal descent through the four levels from bright light into what will eventually be Stygian darkness, is centred around a great void. The core of the building is space, more or less vertical airy space: lyrical, diaphanous, and intersected horizontally by enormous galleries. This is a bold solution to an extremely difficult site. I keep searching for a vegetal analogy for the structure: the lateral relationships, and the ways the galleries and external terraces come off the central core, seem like lily pads coming off a rhizomatic stalk.

Despite the immense complexity of the shapes and volumes of Kazuyo Sejima’s building, and the impossible grandeur of the three-storey volume at the heart of her building, it is, remarkably, immediately legible: there is an unforgettable moment on arrival when the entire gallery lies before and below, when one sees at a glance how it is structured, where main destinations are located. This instant intelligibility, this accessibility, is fundamental to a successful public building: it welcomes everyone, it shows, in its very structure, that the Gallery is for everyone, in every way. This attitude drives each aspect of the project, expressed here in the making of the building. Art museums are one of the contemporary world’s great meeting places – free, mostly unscheduled, engaging, relatively Covid-safe – and the AGNSW’s frank embrace of this function is meeting a huge need. The social value of the reconfigured Gallery’s two buildings is immense. ‘Art for all’ say the Gallery’s royal-blue street banners, and this promise is kept from the minute one steps into the building.

It is an emotional tone underscored by Seijima’s use of lovely warm materials, simultaneously elegant and relaxed. The flesh-pink screen around the shop was commissioned from surfboard manufacturers on Sydney’s Northern beaches; a magnificent rammed-earth wall is offset with Portuguese limestone, the colours soft, slightly golden. This apparent casualness allows careful management of the enormous spaces: despite summer days when 18,000 people poured in, and queues formed for some displays, the building never seemed over-crowded. That is the point of the huge interior volume: traffic management is about the sense of space as luxury, to be freely enjoyed. The transits down the escalators are not only physical: they are emotional.

Yiribana Gallery featuring (from left) Yukultji Napangati Untitled 2005, Doreen Reid Nakamarra Untitled 2007, Bobby West Tjupurrula Tingari sites around Kiwirrkura 2015 and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa Tingari fire dreaming at Wilkinkarra 2008, and (top) Yhonnie Scarce Death zephyr 2017 (photograph by Zan Wimberley)

A clear statement of this determined inclusivity runs through the content of the first installations, in both buildings. Importantly, Indigenous Australian art is foregrounded with the placement of the Yiribana Gallery at the moment of arrival in the SAANA building, the only art on that level, and is everywhere integrated in displays in both buildings; work by women is now a focus, with the Gallery honouring its commitment to gender parity across collections, commissions, and exhibitions; and an innovative conception of the relationships between Australian and international artists is manifested throughout, perhaps most strikingly in the South building, where historical international and Australian collections are shown together for the first time, a welcome innovation.

In the North building, with its focus on the contemporary, I see a distinct preference for art from the Southern Hemisphere – New Zealand, the Pacific, South Africa – and from Asia. This is a truly global conception of contemporary art. In the magnificent Dreamhome: Stories of Art and Shelter, for instance, we see commissioned works by Los Angeles artist Samara Golden alongside collaborative work by the Filipino-Australian duo Alfredo and Isabel Aquilizan, together with major works by the British artist Phyllida Barlow and Māori Michael Parekowhai. The exhibition’s provocative title – whose ‘dream home’? in the suburbs? in a new country? – speaks to the Gallery’s commitment to contemporary questions. This runs through the splendid Outlaw, featuring video works in a specially equipped gallery; these spring from Chinese drawn martial arts narratives and centre on Howie Tsui’s terrific five-channel Retainers of anarchy (2017). Not all displays are equally successful: it will take time for the Gallery to settle into this new home and explore its challenges and possibilities, and at the moment, to be honest, they are often crammed full, manifesting the urgency with which the new building has been awaited. (All new art museums are overhung.)

The Tank space in the Art Gallery of New South Wales (photograph by Jenni Carter)

Finally, the lowest level of the building: the Tank, built in 1942 as wartime maritime fuel storage. It was extraordinary good fortune to be able to incorporate the Tank into the North building: it is exactly the sort of resonant industrial setting that today’s artists crave for installations. The passion for frisson between contemporary art and obsolete settings may change or fade away, but this 2,200 square metre space, now featuring a fantastical subterranean world by Argentinian-Peruvian Adrián Villar Rojas, is reconfigurable for annual ephemeral projects. It is an unexpected gift from the past to the future.

Let’s return to the light-filled upper floor of the North building, to address a few of the canards quacking around the AGNSW this summer. One opinion says the new building is all entertainment, that there is not much additional space for art. Nonsense: exhibition space has nearly doubled, from 9,000 to 16000 square metres; the 1,300 square metre room in the new building, which will first be used for temporary exhibitions when the Louise Bourgeois show opens next summer is, I believe, the largest in an Australian art museum. I suspect the sheer size of the building has led some to mistake the scale of its huge rooms: to wit, Soojakim’s participatory Archive of mind (2016) is given the luxury of one gigantic room for a single work. One more measure: floor space for twentieth-century art in the South building has doubled. This reconfiguration has ensured huge visitation.

That said, Naomi Stead in The Saturday Paper is right: the huge circulation spaces are for parties and being seen and Instagramming. And that’s exactly the point: public use in all its forms. And while there has been a lot of talk about the availability, or not, of Harbour views, the new building is not a Harbour viewing platform. Instead, SAANA offers a series of conceal and reveal moments that promise, flirt with, and eventually reveal Sydney Harbour to the north, as one transits through the building. Finally, the exterior terraces are revealed as park-like spaces for public use, day and night, with those spectacular views.

The Sydney Modern Project has, as the AGNSW claims, transformed the older South buildings, with beautiful work there by Sydney firm Tonkin Zulaikha Greer Architects. In the process, the Project has renovated the offerings spread between the two buildings. Taken as a whole, the Gallery’s campus provides the full range of the contemporary art museum: galleries, including huge reconfigurable spaces, but also film and lecture theatres, spaces for performances and music, function and members rooms; cafés and terraces, and what is undoubtedly the country’s leading art library, complete with a dedicated children’s library.

Each function is enabled by specific architectural settings. Which is one way to look at the relationships between the principal building campaigns at the AGNSW: each moment is recognised, preserved. There are three distinct museum moments: the grand Old Courts at the turn of the nineteenth century; 1970s brutalism for modern art in Andrew Andersons’s Cook Wing; and the floating spaces of SAANA’s building for the multiple art forms in the future museum. All are respected. Which is why I prefer the buildings being completely separate. And while cross-references between historical holdings in the South building and contemporary works in the North are continually made, each manifests a particular moment in the development of art museums. By May 2023, the two buildings, indeed the entire site, will have been linked, and with the entire site, by Wiradjuri and Kamilaroi artist Jonathan Jones’s Indigenous art garden, entitled bíal gwiyúŋo (the fire is not yet lighted), which is still under construction. Expect an update then.

Above all, the Art Gallery of New South Wales has made bold choices: to welcome all; to respect the past while welcoming the future; to recognise that the Gallery sits on Gadigal land, and to be conscious of that legacy and responsibility; to actively address social issues; and to engage a firm of Japanese architects to build its new future-facing building in the country’s largest Asian-Australian city. This is a defining moment in Australian art museum history – on many levels.