ABR’s new Laureate

On 24 May, ABR named its third Laureate at a major event at the State Library of Victoria, hosted by Monash University’s Faculty of Arts. Monash University is ABR’s principal partner.

Internationally renowned historian Sheila Fitzpatrick joins our other Laureates, David Malouf and Robyn Archer. We list some of Professor Fitzpatrick’s myriad academic distinctions, publications, and accolades on page 13. Her connection with Australian Book Review has been significant since her return to Australia in 2012, and we know she is among ABR readers’ favourite contributors to the magazine. Always we look to honour a writer or artist who has excelled in his or her discipline or profession, and one who is sympathetic to the work of ABR.

On this occasion, having laurelled a poet–novelist and a singer–director of the first water, we wanted to recognise history and memoir, two genres of central importance to ABR and its readers. Few scholars have brought greater lustre to Australia, internationally, than our new Laureate.

Sheila Fitzpatrick told Advances: ‘I am tremendously pleased and touched by this honour. Australian Book Review has meant a great deal to me ever since I returned to Australia in 2012 after decades overseas. The magazine’s warm welcome to me as a writer then meant that I immediately felt part of a lively and inclusive intellectual community. It’s not often that historians get to be laureates, but ABR is reminding us that in Greek mythology Clio was one of the muses, and writing should be part of our job description. I’ll do my best to live up to that, and am excited to join ABR in this new role.’

Prizes galore

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize closed in early May, with a large field from thirty-eight countries. Judging is well underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted stories in the August issue.

Meanwhile, the alluringly alliterative Peter Porter Poetry prize will open on 11 July – for the twentieth time. The prize money totals $10,000, with a first prize of $6,000. Our judges this year are Lachlan Brown, Felicity Plunkett, and Dan Disney (winner of the 2023 Porter Prize).

On page 27 we publish ‘Child Adjacent’, by Bridget Vincent, runner-up in this year’s Calibre Essay Prize.

Interestingly, the current reader survey reveals that Calibre is your favourite ABR literary prize, by a whisker from the Jolley.

Reader survey

Many thanks to those of you who have already completed the online reader survey. The response has been prompt, helpful, and mostly very positive. We’ll summarise the key data later, but we were amused by some of the responses to the question as to whom you would like to see in the magazine. ‘Myself,’ said one respondent, with bold candour. ‘King Charles III,’ nominated another. (‘Spare me,’ wailed the Editor.)

The survey is anonymous, unless you want to be in the running to win one of two exciting prizes. Thanks to Palace Cinemas we are delighted to offer one lucky reader a ten-ticket pass to one of its remaining 2023 national film festivals (Spanish, Scandinavian, Italian, or British). Another lucky entrant will win a three-year digital subscription to ABR.

Please complete this short reader survey and help us to go on improving the magazine.

Four tributes

In recent weeks, Australia has lost a number of stellar writers and one of its legendary performers. ABR, too, recalls contributions from some of them.

Barry Humphries – the radical Dadaist from Camberwell, who died on 22 April – conquered stages from Melbourne to Palm Desert, California and went on performing well into his eighties. Has any other comedian appeared in front of more people, we wonder.

Humphries wrote for ABR once, in February 1971, about Barry McKenzie, one of his more egregious creations. He noted the other Barry’s ‘inexhaustible expressions for physical incontinence’. But there was much more to Humphries than frocks and gladioli and ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain’. He was the ultimate polymath. In his tribute, singer, director, and musicologist Peter Tregear writes about Humphries’ shared passion for the music of Weimar Germany.

John Tranter, who died on 21 April, was a prolific, celebrated, and spiritedly partisan poet and publisher. He wrote for ABR many times, from 1983 to 2015. His fellow poet and friend Kate Lilley remembers Tranter fondly in this issue.

Gabrielle Carey, who has died aged sixty-four, was best known for Puberty Blues (1979), the iconic coming-of-age novel she co-authored with Kathy Lette as a teenager. Moving Among Strangers: Randolph Stow and my family (2013) won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Claudia Hyles’s review of Waiting Room (2009), a memoir of Carey’s mother’s brain tumour diagnosis and treatment, appears in this month’s From the Archive on page 64.

Carey was also a lifelong Joycean. Her final work, James Joyce: A life (Arden), will be released posthumously in August.

Allan Gyngell was one of the country’s outstanding diplomats and the founding executive director of the Lowy Institute. Foreign Minister Penny Wong has lauded him as ‘our finest mind in Australian foreign policy’ and its ‘definitive historian’.

Gyngell wrote for the magazine several times. In mid-April, our Editor sounded him out about reviewing Revealing Secrets, John Blaxland and Clare Birgin’s book on Australia’s intelligence community, about which Gyngell knew more than anyone. Gyngell wrote back promptly, regretting that a sudden cancer diagnosis had ‘shouldered [him] onto the medical treadmill’. He died fourteen days later. 

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Forrest River massacres

Dear Editor,

May I respond to a comment by Professor Ann Curthoys concerning my work on the alleged Forrest River massacres contained in her review of Professor Kate Auty’s recent study of the case (ABR, May 2023)?

Curthoys says that Professor Geoffrey Bolton, ‘the doyen of Western Australian history’, disputed the conclusions of my research on the matter as published in my book Massacre Myth (1999). She was referring to the debate between Bolton and myself contained in Ethics and the Practice of History, Volume 26 in the Studies in Western Australian History series (2010).

In fact, Bolton was most even-handed in his analysis, conceding that my scepticism on a particular matter in the case was justified. Further, far from dismissing entirely my study of the murder allegations, Bolton generously launched Massacre Myth. The closing comment of his launch speech was, ‘Let healthy debate continue.’ Of course, such an intellectual credo would find no support in a contemporary university’s humanities department.

Further, Bolton wrote the preface to my follow-up study of the Forrest River affair, Sex, Maiming and Murder (2001). The book examined the credibility of the chief accuser in the Forrest River case, Ernest Gribble, as a witness to the truth. I documented the falsity of a series of very serious accusations he made against pastoralists and police between 1915 and 1926.

In his preface, Bolton said he was ‘enlightened’ by the book’s analysis. Given that he was indeed the doyen of Western Australian history, it was a most gratifying and generous endorsement.

Rod Moran

Ann Curthoys replies:

Rod Moran objects to my statement that Geoffrey Bolton, in an essay in 2010, disputed his general conclusion that no massacre occurred at Forrest River in 1926. My comment arose in the context of outlining, very briefly, a history of debate prior to the publication of Kate Auty’s O’Leary of the Underworld: The untold story of the Forrest River Massacre.

Geoffrey Bolton gave in 2010 an open-minded account of the disputed set of events at Forrest River in 1926, considering the work of Neville Green, Rod Moran, Kate Auty, and Christine Halse, re-examining the documentary sources, and drawing on his own historical knowledge of that region at that time.

Far from supporting Moran’s argument that there was no massacre, he concluded that a massacre likely did occur, but with fewer deaths than some historians have suggested. I quote: ‘Personally I consider it likely that Aborigines were shot at Gotegotemerrie and Mowerie, though not at Dala, but this is a historian’s judgment and not one that could be sustained in a court of law.’ And later, in the context of discussing the number of deaths, he commented, ‘It was bad enough that seven Aborigines, or eleven Aborigines, may have been killed by members of a police party in 1926. It is not necessary to inflate the numbers so as to inflate our revulsion to the deed.’ Bolton also hoped that additional research would throw new light on the matter. 

Further research has indeed been done since then, most notably by Kate Auty, whose book indicates a prodigious amount of research into the killings, the surrounding events, the perpetrators, and the victims. I think Geoffrey Bolton would be pleased that research and debate do indeed continue, and I trust that Rod Moran is too.

A cruel joke

Dear Editor,

The state of Israeli democracy is indeed dire, as was eloquently explained by David N. Myers in his article in the May 2023 edition.

It is worth stressing that the Jewish state has never been a democracy for all its citizens but a self-described democracy for Jews alone. Ever since Israel’s birth in 1948, non-Jews within Israel have never been treated with equal rights. For those Palestinians residing in the West Bank and Gaza, now suffering under the longest occupation in modern times, the concept of Israeli democracy is a cruel joke. 

A key question remains. The world knows that Israel is accelerating its path towards a fundamentalist Jewish ethno-state. Mass protests within Israel are unlikely to seriously challenge this trajectory. It is therefore up to the international community and civil society to respond accordingly. Just as the world finally turned against apartheid South Africa (Israel, notably, was a key defence and ideological ally of this nation until its end in 1994), it is time for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions to be applied against Israel. It would be a non-violent and wholly legitimate response to the unsustainable status quo. 

Antony Loewenstein

Patrick Mullins replies to John Carmody

Dear Editor,

Tanya Plibersek’s biographer, Margaret Simons, has anticipated John Carmody’s question: ‘Why does Patrick Mullins consider an appointment as minister for the environment a demotion in his review?’ (Letters, May 2023). I concur with her answer, on page 88 of Tanya Plibersek: ‘Environment and water are both important jobs, but the fact that it was a demotion in terms of cabinet ranking is indisputable.’

Patrick Mullins

Chrissie Foster

Dear Editor,

Barney Zwartz’s review of Chrissie Foster’s book Still Standing (ABR, May 2023) reminds us once again of the egregious behaviour – and, indeed, crimes – of some of the most senior clerics in the Catholic church. I only hope that Chrissie Foster has received at least some solace from airing the immeasurable pain she has suffered. What a courageous woman! Kudos, too, to the press for its role in exposing those elements of the Catholic Church that have caused, or enabled, so much pain and suffering.

Bob Howe (online comment)

In 2008, at the Australian zenith of the American custom of rating the first hundred days in power, Kevin Rudd issued a fifty-five-page booklet to mark his new government’s quotidian ton. Inevitably, it proved nothing much at all. Critics said it was both premature and simply validated the critique that Labor under Rudd had ‘hit the ground reviewing’. The Sydney Morning Herald worked out that Rudd had initiated an inquiry every four days, which sounded bad. But after eleven years of John Howard’s government, many things required attention. As Rudd countered, Howard had initiated ‘495 inquiries and reviews in 2005–06 alone’.

Of course, so far out from the next election, these arguments were boutique affairs. A meatier juncture for interim evaluation comes with the first trimester of the three-year parliamentary term, which, for the current forty-seventh parliament, ticked over in May.

Self-evidently, a year encompasses a full cycle of annual events, including international meetings and a federal budget (or even two) in which election promises were either honoured via appropriations, or deep sixed.

The first-year snapshot brings something else of interest. In the Westminster parliamentary tradition, it is a two-for-one birthday, twinned by what we might call the annus frustratus of the freshly spurned. Such is the lot of the ‘shadow’ government that the victor’s year in clover marks a year in Coventry for the vanquished – twelve months in which to reflect, regroup, and, ideally, reposition. Is that what Peter Dutton’s Liberal National Party coalition has been doing – repositioning?

According to the truism, oppositions do not win elections, governments lose them. Generally speaking, this takes more than a year and, historically, more than a term. There has been no single-term federal government since 1932. This underscores the impotence of opposition parties, forced to lie in wait until their time comes. Even when it does, calibrating effort to suit the circumstances requires skill and discipline. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, sometimes an opposition’s best approach is to stand back while a tiring government makes errors of its own accord.

Lachlan Murdoch’s defamation proceedings against Crikey promised to be a test case on the new public interest defence. Following Murdoch’s discontinuation of his claim in April, the scope and application of the public interest defence to defamation await another appropriate vehicle.

Lachlan Murdoch commenced proceedings in the Federal Court of Australia, suing not only Private Media, the publisher of Crikey, but also its former editor-in-chief, Peter Fray, and its political editor, Bernard Keane. Subsequently, he applied to have Private Media’s chairman, Eric Beecher, and its chief executive officer, Will Hayward, added as respondents.

The proceedings arose out of a column by Keane published in late June 2022 under the headline, ‘Trump is a confirmed unhinged traitor. And Murdoch is his unindicted co-conspirator.’ In the column, Keane referred to ‘the Murdochs’ as being ‘unindicted co-conspirators’, along with former US president, Donald Trump, responsible for the 6 January attack on the Capitol.

Although Crikey initially took down the column in response to correspondence from Lachlan Murdoch’s solicitor, it subsequently changed its position. It reposted the article, then took out advertisements in The New York Times and The Canberra Times, challenging Murdoch to sue for defamation. Murdoch did just that.

Murdoch’s defamation proceedings in Australia did not occur in a vacuum. Also afoot at the same time were defamation proceedings in Delaware, brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News. Dominion sued over repeated assertions by Fox News presenters and on-air guests that its voting systems were rigged to help the Democrats ‘steal’ the 2020 United States presidential election from Trump.

Prior to trial, Dominion received a vast amount of documentary evidence and depositions from key figures within Fox News and Fox Corporation, including Rupert Murdoch himself. This material disclosed that from the time of the 2020 election until after the Capitol insurrection, Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch doubted Trump’s assertion that he had won the presidential election but were willing to enable compères and commentators who subscribed to this conspiracy theory, so as not to alienate the Fox News audience. The Fox News audience had already been alienated by the news channel’s election-night reporting that the Democrats had won the key state of Arizona, taking it from the Republicans.

The revelations in the pre-trial disclosure were devastating to Fox News’s defence in the defamation proceedings brought by Dominion. To understand the full extent of the damage wrought by this material, one needs to know a little about US defamation law. Since the United States Supreme Court’s landmark decision in New York Times v Sullivan in 1964, it has been extremely difficult for plaintiffs with any public profile to sue for defamation in the United States. The plaintiff needs to prove that what has been published is false (which is the reverse of the position which pertains elsewhere in the English-speaking world, where the defendant has to prove what it published was true). The plaintiff also needs to prove that the defendant published with ‘actual malice’. Actual malice means either knowledge that what was published was false, or reckless indifference as to whether it was true or false. A defamation plaintiff in the United States faces a very high bar in order to establish liability. Yet Dominion was clearly on track to be able to establish liability against Fox News. The trial judge had made preliminary rulings that the allegations were clearly false. The material disclosed prior to trial provided a firm foundation for an argument that Fox News was motivated by actual malice. It was unsurprising then that, on the day the six-week trial was due to commence, the matter settled. (It is worth noting that a company like Dominion could not have sued for defamation in Australia because corporations have been presumptively precluded from suing for defamation across Australia since 2005.)

The settlement in Dominion v Fox News made legal and commercial sense for the Murdochs. The Murdochs avoided having to give evidence and, more importantly, being cross-examined on the damaging revelations. The amount agreed to – US$787.5 million – while vast, was not as much as Dominion had initially sought. Fox News also avoided having to agree to make an on-air apology or retraction. Dominion v Fox News is not the last of the voting machine defamation cases it faces. At the time of writing, Fox News still faces a defamation lawsuit from Smartmatic, one of Dominion’s competitors, over similar vote-rigging allegations, with a claim for even larger damages.

Compared to the US defamation proceedings, the stakes in Lachlan Murdoch’s Australian defamation proceedings against Crikey were, on one view, much lower. The damages he could have recovered in Australia would have been considerably smaller than those Fox News had agreed to pay Dominion. Damages for non-economic loss in Australia, comprising damage to reputation and injury to feelings, are capped, with the current limit being set at $443,000. This full amount would be awarded only in the most serious case. A successful plaintiff can also seek aggravated damages, for any additional hurt or humiliation they suffered, so long as they can prove that the defendant’s conduct was improper, unjustifiable, or lacking in bona fides. Exemplary (or punitive) damages cannot be awarded for defamation in Australia. Damages for economic loss might be claimed in Australia and are uncapped, but any amount sought and awarded would have been dwarfed by the amount received by Dominion.

Having settled the defamation case in the United States with Dominion in order to minimise the reputational harm done by the revelations in the pre-trial disclosure and to avoid cross-examination, it was difficult for Lachlan Murdoch to continue his defamation case against Crikey in Australia. This was particularly because Crikey was keen to rely on those revelations in its defence. It would have defeated the purpose of the settlement of the Dominion proceedings to continue with the Crikey proceedings.

There is another way in which the pursuit of the Crikey proceedings could have been self-defeating for the Murdochs’ media interests. A central defence relied upon by Crikey was the new public interest defence to defamation. This defence was one of the key reforms introduced across Australia (except for Western Australia and the Northern Territory) in 2021 in the first stage of the reforms to the national, uniform defamation laws. Along with the introduction of a requirement that the plaintiff prove serious harm to reputation, the public interest defence was intended to make Australia’s defamation laws less plaintiff-friendly. To win his case against Crikey, Lachlan Murdoch would have had to defeat Crikey’s public interest defence. If successful, he would be setting a precedent, which, while it might have secured him substantial damages in his own case, would also be used against mass media outlets in Australia in every other case in the future. On one view, it might be fairly said that it was not in the interests of Murdoch’s media outlets for Lachlan Murdoch to have won his case against Crikey.

With Lachlan Murdoch discontinuing his defamation proceeding, Crikey declared victory for public interest journalism. The determination of the actual operation of the new public interest defence to defamation has been deferred. The case then is not important for the precedent it establishes, because it establishes none. Like Christian Porter’s defamation proceedings against the ABC, Lachlan Murdoch’s case against Crikey demonstrates that strategy and commercial realities are just as important in high-stakes defamation cases as strict legalities. Ultimately, in these kinds of stand-offs, it comes down to who blinks first.

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

In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I have come to look forward to each new crisis because it is the only way I have discovered of being able to be rid of the existing one.’

Bunting could have been writing about Scott Morrison and the government he led in the last parliamentary term (2019–22). A drought was followed by bushfires and then by floods. A pandemic unleashed a public health emergency and unprecedented economic upheaval. The prime minister, a political animal who failed upward into high office, constantly and often ineptly sought to find some way to retain his supremacy.

The subtitle of this volume, then, is a fitting encapsulation of the 2019–22 period. It is also stinging, for the Morrison government also governed by crisis. As this book chronicles, the government’s tendency towards inaction, incrementalism, reactive politicking, and sheer blatant panic often bred fresh catastrophes. ‘Every day a crisis,’ wrote Bunting in 1971, and it was as true for Morrison’s government as it was for McMahon’s.

Just over a decade ago, Ross McMullin published Farewell, Dear People (2012), a magisterial biography of ten remarkable Australians killed in World War I. The book met with much acclaim, including the award of the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History in 2013. Life So Full of Promise, a sequel to this volume, provides three more biographies of men whose early lives suggested that they would have made extraordinary contributions to Australian public life, had they survived the war.

In this book, McMullin adopts a similar approach: although the main focus is on the individual men, their stories are situated within detailed accounts of the families and communities from which they came. His aim is to highlight not just the ‘radiant but unfulfilled promise’ of these relatively unknown Australians, but also to illuminate what the war was like for Australians at home. It is clearly a labour of love, as McMullin pursues his ‘extraordinary and inspiring Australians’ through genealogies and military records, personal papers and newspapers, school and sporting archives. Its 562 pages of text provide a meticulously researched, detailed, and vivid evocation of the lives and deaths of these three men and of the worlds they occupied. These were parallel lives, but the men had more in common than the fact of their exceptional abilities and their wartime deaths. All three were keen and talented sportsmen, and much is made of the role that sport in general and cricket in particular played in their lives.

Bomber Command operations cost about 3,500 Australian lives in World War II. This was more than five times the number of Australians who died in the Battle of Kokoda from July to November 1942. Yet the strategic bombing offensive over Germany has never held a comparable place in the national memory of war.

Possibly this is because Bomber Command did not lend itself to a nationalist narrative. Whereas Kokoda became ‘the battle that saved Australia’, all Australians serving with the Royal Air Force (RAF) were far from home and absorbed into multinational squadrons. The bombing campaign, too, was fought miles above the earth in night skies punctuated by flashes of light and flares. The photographic record could not capture the cultural imagination as readily as did the dramatic Owen Stanley Range. Then, there is the enduring controversy about the bombing of German cities. Was it worth the cost? Did it contribute significantly to Allied victory? Did it breach the laws of war by deliberately targeting civilians?

A key argument deployed by those in favour of the United Kingdom leaving the European Union concerned the restoration of parliamentary sovereignty. One of the ironies of Brexit is that some of the leading figures who argued for parliamentary sovereignty during the 2016 referendum tried to shut down Parliament three years later so that they could ‘get Brexit done’. This attack on a representative institution was part of an international pattern of democratic backsliding during the 2010s. For the authors of this new book, understanding the internal dynamics of Parliament during the Brexit years forms part of an effort to ‘defend democracy and its institutions’.

Following the 2016 referendum, the Westminster parliament became the crucible of the eventual form of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the EU. With its shifting balance of forces, unwritten conventions, and arcane rules, the parliamentary arena shaped behaviours and created unintended consequences that a polarised electorate struggled to comprehend. Meg Russell and Lisa James’s impressive and meticulously researched book sets out in fine detail how and why this came to be, and offers a clear chronological explanation and thematic analysis of those difficult years.

Brexit was so difficult because it opened a question that had not been addressed in British politics for a long time: who exactly was in charge? The 2016 referendum ostensibly initiated a three-cornered contest for authority between Government, Parliament, and People, with the pro-Brexit press and the courts playing crucial supporting roles.

It is 1856 in a village near Lucknow, the capital of the northern Indian kingdom of Awadh. Two nawabs, Mir and Mirza, are engrossed in a game of chess, oblivious to the calamity unfolding around them. Satyajit Ray’s 1977 screen adaptation of Munshi Premchand’s short story ‘The Chess Players’ captures the decadence and idleness of Awadh, whose indulgent nobility preferred reciting Urdu poetry, listening to ghazals, and enjoying the sensuous pleasures of the zenana to paying attention to the well-being of their subjects. As Mir and Mirza continue the chess game, their state is annexed by the British on the pretext of maladministration – without a shot being fired.

The scene features in the opening chapter of The India Way: Strategies for an uncertain world by India’s minister for external affairs, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar. In a world undergoing profound transformation, Jaishankar warns there is no room for the ‘political romanticism’ that has permeated India’s strategic policy in the past, namely looking the other way when threats knock at its doors.

As India basks in the attention being showered upon it this year while it holds the rotating presidency of the Group of 20, Jaishankar has emerged as the main articulator of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s world view – one that marks a profound rejection of India’s longstanding commitment to non-alignment based on Gandhian values of non-violence championed by its first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. In Jaishankar’s words, India’s new grand strategy is based on ‘advancing [its] national interests by identifying and exploiting opportunities created by global contradictions’. Non-alignment has become multi-alignment – or, in Jaishankar’s terminology, ‘plurilateralism’.

In previous memoirs, Brisbane-based writer Kris Kneen has examined their life through the lens of their sexuality (Affection, 2009) and their family history (The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen, 2021). In Fat Girl Dancing, Kneen’s lens is their body, specifically the body of a ‘short, fat, ageing woman’.

The struggle with body image that Kneen depicts here – a struggle that will be familiar to anyone who has stared in the mirror at a body they don’t recognise – is candid, unflinching, and exquisitely written.

Kneen structures Fat Girl Dancing around episodes that illustrate what they characterise as the shameful failures of their body, its refusal to comply with their need to deep-sea dive, trek, wear fashionable clothes, be desired, and, centrally, relocate the ‘huntress of my youth: proud, confident, busty, self-possessed and very, very sexy’.

Having determined that the cultural, scientific, and historical research with which they began the project served only to remove them from their own experience of ‘fatness’, Kneen resolves to write Fat Girl Dancing ‘from inside my own flesh’, a body ‘[b]ulbous, blocky, disproportionately wide in the middle, top-heavy with surprisingly massive upper arms … mottled all over with the light and shade of subcutaneous fat’.

'Who hasn’t longed to run away?’ asks Susan Johnson at the beginning of this memoir-cum-travel book about her time on the Greek island of Kythera. It is a question that invites a show of hands. Fewer people, however, might be inclined to bring their mothers with them.

Johnson’s plan is to spend time with her widowed mother, Barbara, while working as a writer in a place she has longed to revisit since her early twenties. For her, Kythera, mythical birthplace of the goddess Aphrodite, is a sweep of sky and rock and ‘singing light’ surrounded by a sea of an ‘exultant’ blue, and she is eager for Barbara to love it as much as she does. And so, Johnson writes, the two women set off on their adventure with light hearts.

This mutual exuberance doesn’t last much beyond the first chapter. It is soon clear that mother and daughter carry very different baggage, starting with their attitude to travel. Johnson, who has lived in many places over the years, presents herself as eager to embrace different places and cultures. Barbara has also travelled, but always as a company wife, on business trips with her husband. According to her daughter she is incurious, a woman for whom Goondiwindi and Uzbekistan have as much resonance as Kythera. There are other differences. Johnson has a bawdy sense of humour; her mother disapproves of jokes about sex. Johnson has rejected religion; Barbara is a devout churchgoing Anglican who rejects her daughter’s invitation to attend an Easter service with a prim, ‘It’s not our Easter.’

Poet and editor extraordinaire John Tranter died on 21 April 2023, after a few cruel years of illness with Lewy body dementia. Friends and family gathered at his funeral in the inner Sydney suburb of Rozelle on what would have been his eightieth birthday (29 April) to celebrate John’s remarkable life and mourn his loss. I was honoured to be one of the speakers: what follows incorporates what I said there.

Philip Mead, John’s close friend and collaborator of many years, officiated; joanne burns read ‘Backyard’, one of John’s most iconic Sydney poems. There were heartbreakingly funny, thought-provoking, and intimate reminiscences from John’s children, Leon and Kirsten; grandson, Henry; and, finally, Lyn, John’s wife of fifty-five years. Through her literary agency, Australian Literary Management, Lyn underwrote the wildly ambitious poetic undertakings of Tranter’s later years – not just his own significant collections, such as Ultra (2001), Urban Myths (2006), Starlight (2010), and Heartstarter (2015), but the forty massive issues of Tranter’s ground-breaking, internationally lauded online Jacket Magazine (1997–2010, with Pam Brown as Associate Editor), still fully accessible through the University of Pennsylvania, where its legacy continues in Jacket2.

John was a great person and a great poet. He was an incredible advocate of the people and things he cared about; a maven and connector who delighted in sharing his loves and hatreds. His poetry was cool, but he was hotheaded. No one has been more important to the institution of Australian poetry, editorially and creatively. His loss is immeasurable, but so too his legacy – the gift of his poems, the anthologies he edited, the books he published (including Gig Ryan’s first book, The Division of Anger [1980]), the radio interviews, the readings, the tireless activity behind the scenes to foster friendships and collaborations and support the experimental work he believed in.

The nuclear family has a bad literary rap. As we know from fiction and memoir, the traditional two-heterosexual-parents-and-biological-kids model, a structure that provides stability and nourishment for some, can also be a stricture, a disappointment, even a crucible of cruelty. The opening sentence of Anna Karenina notwithstanding, unhappiness is unhappiness; there are common experiences for the survivors of family difficulty, even when specifics differ.

Family: Stories of belonging collects short pieces by nineteen Australian writers about their experiences of family. Alaina Gougoulis and Ian See have marshalled writers not just with diverse backgrounds but also with diverse stories to tell. The editors apprehend that experience is not in itself enough when seeking work of literary rather than therapeutic value, heeding V.S. Pritchett’s warning: ‘It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.’

What do we want as readers from a collection like this? Insight into lives that are not our own, writing that sings or stings, perhaps the self-improvement of an emotional weights session to build our empathy muscles. Family delivers on all counts. It has been curated with care and flair. Some pieces capture the miseries of growing up in dysfunctional nuclear families, while others explore extended models of what families can be. A dominant theme is yearning for family – or perhaps, more exactly, a longing for connection and safety, and to be understood.

I feel like I need to come out every day. I’m pushing the stroller, fishing out the dummy, pointing out dogs, but this isn’t what it looks like. At the playground or the checkout, I take the nods and maternal solidarity, staying inside the parenting illusion until it feels slightly disingenuous. I am not the mother. I am an aunt instead, if ‘instead’ is even the right word. There are categories – infertile, childless by circumstance, childless by choice – and within these, more specific groups like the Birthstrikers, who are publicly delaying procreation until there is climate action. Being an aunt of the Anthropocene is none of these, and all of them at once.

On one of the smokiest days of the Victorian bushfires, Jack and I make a run for it on the V-Line train to Ballarat. The air-quality index is in the maroon zone: the particle numbers are so far into the hundreds that you can’t compute them any more. People are staying home, and we are in an almost empty carriage: today there are no other prams, no teenagers sitting on the luggage rack. I angle the stroller so that he can spot diggers. It is almost completely white outside: the only observation you can make is digger or no digger. All the other things you would normally look for are invisible – there is no look Jack tree, look Jack birdy. That he doesn’t know to ask where the birds and trees are is either the best or the worst thing.

‘Nulliparous’: a description for a galaxy, or maybe a snake. I reflect one 3 am that ‘childless’ doesn’t feel like the right word when you’re finding the lost dummy for the fourth time that night. I once came up with the half-joking ‘child adjacent’ as the best term for my situation. ‘Childless’ suggests involuntariness; ‘childless by choice’ feels like there is a silent ‘goddammit’. If ‘childless’ is too negative about my situation, ‘childfree’ is too negative about children themselves: they are not a disease, or gluten. But perhaps to be child adjacent is also to risk being, well, child adjacent: the one that never grew up.

The remarkable second act of Jimmy Little’s career commenced with the release of Messenger in 1999. The album was a selection of atmospheric renditions of classic Australian rock songs. In stark contrast to the reassuring homeliness of his earlier recordings, Little’s reading of them evoked an Australia of vast empty spaces, melancholy, and solitude. Those lucky enough to attend the concerts that followed were struck by his goodwill and by the assured mastery of his performance and the fineness of his voice, which hadn’t deteriorated with age.

The truth was that many of us had forgotten about Little, imagining that his politics were of another era, and his commitment to an unfashionable Christianity out of date. Though Little was intensely private, his performances and the album unsettled this condescension. His interpretation of Messenger’s selection of songs, many of which were literary and some esoteric, relied for its force on precise enunciation and considered phrasing. Although he remained an enigma, one felt that something personal was being shared, in an oblique way, with his audience. His delivery of the Go-Betweens’ ‘Cattle and Cane’, for instance, seemed to reveal something of the isolation he must have experienced as an Aboriginal public figure and performer at a time when assimilation was the most enlightened policy in Aboriginal affairs:

I recall a bigger brighter world
A world of books and silent times in thought
And then the railroad, the railroad takes him home
Through fields of cattle, through fields of cane

Hassled by deadlines and stricken by illness, I made a very modern deal with the devil. I asked ChatGPT to help me review David Cohen’s new short story collection, The Terrible Event. For the past few months, this text generating tool has made news by using AI technology to write everything from A+ high-school essays to faux-Nick Cave lyrics. Surely, then, it could provide some scaffolding for a thousand-word book review, a few handholds to help a tired reviewer scurry over this task and on to the next?

‘Begin your review by giving a brief summary of the book,’ suggested my bot muse, ‘including the number of stories in the collection, their length, and the general theme.’ Perfect! The eight stories in Cohen’s collection – his second after two previous novels – vary widely in length. Yet they are connected by the general theme of middle-class Westerners driven to existential despair by the blandness of their lives and the hyperactivity of their overcompensating minds. Cohen’s argument seems to be that it takes only the smallest of peas to disturb white-collar reverie. In ‘Andrew’, a character’s mental breakdown begins because ‘in the team meeting the other day Andrew contributed some very good ideas, whereas I was lost for words’. In ‘Bugs’, the bottoming-out arrives with the realisation that ‘we spend our lives resolving IT problems simply in order to continue living our lives, which consist of little else but resolving IT problems’. In some stories, the characters’ unravelling results in jolting spurts of violence – in others, just more unravelling. While this sounds about as fun as watching a computer screen load, Cohen keeps things surprisingly engaging through his use of dry humour and dabs of the surreal.

Tara Calaby’s début novel, based on her doctoral studies, wears its clearly extensive research lightly as it weaves an engrossing story of a young woman’s struggle in 1890s Melbourne towards something a contemporary reader might call social, emotional, and sexual independence. Focused around the story of an individual, House of Longing also traverses a broad canvas of social issues – class, gender roles, attitudes to mental health and its treatment, the importance of friendship, and the possibilities of sexual love between women.

Charlotte Ross is a seemingly unlikely champion of such a paradigm shift. Unassuming, she is initially happy to live quietly with her father and to work in his stationery shop in Elizabeth Street. Her aspiration is to avoid marriage and to continue with the satisfactions of work under the auspices of a loving father. However, two cataclysmic events occur that disrupt the easy opportunities of that path: first, she makes an intense attachment with her friend Flora and is immediately catapulted into the intoxication of that attraction and its confronting implications; and second, she finds herself abruptly without the structure of support, her future bleak and uncertain.

It’s an old adage but an accurate one – making a movie is like going to war, with an army of strangers enduring endless hardship for the sake of a common goal. Hollywood legend Tom Hanks is an expert on both films and warfare, having made his fair share of one about the other, and his first novel, The Making of Another Major Motion Picture Masterpiece (following his bestselling 2017 short story collection, Common Type) is an affable ode to Hollywood and a broad reflection on both personal and national legacy, jam-packed with many of the actor’s well-documented preoccupations.

The book tells the story not of a person but of an intellectual property, beginning in 1947 in Lone Butte, California. Bob Falls, a US Marine flamethrower turned shell-shocked drifter, motorcycles into town after a run-in with the authorities (he jokes that he would ‘rather punch a cop than a clock’), and leaves a lasting impression on his young nephew, Robby. Flash-forward to 1971: Robby Andersen is now a pot-loving comic book artist in Oakland, penning a counter-culture one-shot based on distant memories of his uncle. Flash-forward again to present day, and Hollywood writer–director Bill Johnson, along with his crack producer Al Mac-Teer and a band of trusted collaborators, is combining the IP from Andersen’s comic with that of a sprawling superhero cinematic universe (clearly based on Marvel’s Avengers franchise). Johnson’s film, Knightshade: The Lathe of Firefall, is the ‘masterpiece’ of Hanks’s title, and the ins and outs of its making form the bulk of his novel.

A few pages in to Return to Valetto, the narrator Hugh Fisher is on a train from Rome to Orvieto and is being eyed suspiciously by an elderly Italian woman, who can see the photograph of himself with his daughter that he is using as a bookmark:

I looked up from my book and into her Old Testament face. Mia figlia, I said, my daughter. For good measure, I told her in Italian that I was a widower, that it had taken me the better part of five years to remove my wedding band, that Susan was getting her PhD in economics at Oxford … This information passed through her like a muscle relaxant as she returned to knitting a tiny mauve sock.

At this point I remembered what sort of writer Dominic Smith is: his style is an irresistible combination of sophisticated and engaging. Either the muscle relaxant or, more likely, the tiny mauve sock reminded me of how much I was likely to enjoy the company of this particular writer’s mind, and nothing in the subsequent pages was a disappointment. This passage is also a little masterpiece of technique: it gives us a snapshot of Hugh Fisher in one brief but vividly imagined and cinematic cameo.

Pip Finkemeyer’s Sad Girl Novel (Ultimo, $34.99 pb, 304 pp) is likely to divide readers, based on its title alone. For this reader, the immediate response was cynicism: another début about a young woman adrift and feeling sorry for herself? While unhappy women have populated art – and created it – for centuries, in 2023 the ‘sad girl’ is an aesthetic shorthand that conjures images of Ultraviolence-era Lana Del Rey, pale Tumblr girls with dripping makeup, Daisy Edgar-Jones in Normal People. Female pain, flattened into a marketable package.

In actuality, Finkemeyer’s titular sad girl, Kim Mueller, isn’t all that miserable. An Australian living in Berlin, Kim sees a therapist, whom she likes and does not need to pay. She is writing a ‘sad girl novel’, yet worries little about its specifics or how to support herself while she writes. Her Turkish-German bestie, Belinay, has inherited wealth, as does American literary agent love interest, Matthew, who inspires Kim to write full-time. The question of whether Kim’s pursuit is worthwhile is undercut by her lack of obligations and by her humorous, self-aware narration.

Kim’s voice is a highlight and lends sharpness to scenes that might otherwise lack direction. Whether detailing the disappointing bleakness of Frankfurt Book Fair or the fashion choices of Berghain fuckboi Benedict, her observations make her an enjoyable companion. Yet Kim’s self-awareness has a distancing effect, placing her – and the reader, by extension – at an ironic remove. It is difficult to care all that much, since Kim herself does not seem to care: about her novel, about art in general, about anything besides a vague longing for external validation.

John Guillory is an eminent professor of English at New York University who has written extensively on English studies as an academic discipline. Professing Criticism brings together in revised form a selection of essays he has written on this subject over the past twenty years, together with some new material. Overall, the book offers a very knowledgeable and incisive analysis of the state of literary studies today.

Guillory’s central theme is that ‘professing criticism’ is something of a contradiction in terms, since criticism has more traditionally been considered something for amateurs. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, critics tended to range widely, addressing broad social issues in their popular journalistic pieces. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, this version of the critic was considered lightweight by the literary scholars and philologists who took it upon themselves to professionalise English studies in universities, as what William James described as ‘the PhD octopus’ gathered momentum. ‘Impressionistic’ was for many years a term of abuse that textual scholars would hurl at critics who privileged their own idiosyncratic style of response above the meticulous business of archival or bibliographical research.

Ask anybody to name a philosopher and, chances are, if they can name one, it will be a man. Ask them to name a nineteenth-century British philosopher and they may be stumped, but if they can name one, it will be a man. This book on nineteenth-century women philosophers thus delves into the intersection of two areas of general ignorance.

Women have been virtually absent from the history of philosophy. Nevertheless, a growing impetus to reveal what was written in their ‘disappearing ink’, to use the late Eileen O’Neill’s phrase, has resulted in the works of some early modern women being re-edited and appreciated as insightful contributions to philosophical debates. Alison Stone mentions Elizabeth of Bohemia, Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, and Catharine Trotter Cockburn as having been rediscovered, but, as she notes, nineteenth-century women continue to be absent from standard histories of philosophy.

That history is closely tied to the history of academies and universities, from which women were, until recently, usually excluded. Male philosophers were beneficiaries of a university education – Rousseau a notable exception – and many were university teachers, their status as philosophers conferred by their institutions. Women, not admitted to higher education, were rarely accorded the status of ‘philosopher’. Yet, as Stone demonstrates, a significant cohort of nineteenth-century women participated in philosophical debates, publishing articles in generalist, intellectual magazines and popular books. Many published both in their own names and anonymously, and engaged in philosophical discussion in private correspondence with women and men. Rediscovering women’s contributions to philosophy in the nineteenth century involves moving beyond the academy and acquiring an appreciation of their participation in more generalist philosophical debates.

In July 1986, at the onset of the Glasnost era, a program featuring a discussion between American and Soviet women on a range of contemporary issues was broadcast on Soviet television. Reflecting on the prevalence of sex in US popular culture, an American participant asked her Soviet collocutors whether this was also the case in their country. The response was curt: ‘There is no sex in the USSR.’

Although the full exchange was somewhat more nuanced, this phrase would be inscribed into the Soviet collective memory, as it perfectly captured the Soviet attitude towards sex as an awkward and taboo subject. The sex lives of heterosexual Soviet men and women were indeed confined to the outer margins of public, political, and academic discourse throughout the Soviet era. Homosexuality was an even greater anathema. Yet behind this façade of abstinence, there was sex in the Soviet Union – including gay sex, which is the focus of Rustam Alexander’s insightful volume Red Closet: The hidden history of gay oppression in the USSR.

Alexander’s examination of homosexuality in the Soviet Union represents a feat of historical enquiry on two counts. First, locating and accessing sources on the subject is a difficult (and risky) undertaking in contemporary Russia, where relevant archival collections remain classified, potential witnesses are prone to self-censorship, and where gender and LGBTQ research is often met with intense hostility. Second, Red Closet originates from Alexander’s academic monograph, Regulating Homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956–91: A different history (2021), and has been substantially reworked for a non-specialist audience. Research translation of this nature often presents a significant intellectual challenge, particularly as complex historical phenomena can become flattened in the process. Although not immune to this risk, Red Closet ultimately delivers an account of homosexual experience in the Soviet Union that is at once accessible, informative, and brave.

In the months leading up to the 2022 federal election, as the two major parties duked it out over the cost of living, integrity, and the climate crisis, one issue barely rated a mention amid the barrage of leaders’ debates, press conferences, and doorstops: the Covid-19 pandemic. Having raged in Australia for more than two years, resulting in once-in-a-generation disruption to daily life, including the world’s longest lockdown, the virus had become all but untouchable on both sides of the political divide. Labor and the Coalition obviously reasoned that the best position on Covid electorally was not to have a position at all. Neither party articulated a strategy to manage the virus, or its ever-expanding roll-call of variants, into the future. For the most part, journalists – more interested it seemed in the then Opposition leader’s ‘gaffes’ – could not bring themselves to mention the C-word either.

In Dark Winter, epidemiologist and biosecurity expert Raina MacIntyre forcefully reminds us of the reality the 2022 campaign trail assiduously ignored – most pointedly, that, while we have been repeatedly told the pandemic is over, the number of those dying from Covid is equivalent to a 737 crashing once a week. As MacIntyre points out, if plane crashes were producing as many fatalities, it would be frontpage news.

MacIntyre became a familiar face to Australians during the height of the pandemic, comparable perhaps only to Norman Swan in terms of her visibility as an expert commentator on the pandemic. Her preference for straight talking – The Sydney Morning Herald once memorably dubbed her the ‘cautious coronavirus communicator’ – carries over into this book, her first. A palpable anger permeates its pages, which give expansive shape to MacIntyre’s long-held view that the science of the pandemic has been politicised by ideologues and corrupted by commentators unwilling to address the ‘cascading failures’ of Australia’s response to the virus.

Childhood memories often merge real life with imaginary nostalgia, but in Growing up Modern, Roger Benjamin’s memoir of his family’s 1956 modernist Round House, in the then rural Canberra suburb of Deakin, we find adolescent memories collaged with a mix of archival, architectural, social, and personal histories. It is set mainly during Australia’s postwar years of the 1950s when reconstructive policies drove economic, scientific, educational, and cultural reform. this was also a time when an influx of immigrants, multicultural labourers, and specialist émigrés inserted themselves into Australia’s Anglocentric landscape. The book tells a Canberra and Melbourne story about architectural and cultural modernism, so often imported with the émigrés, that countered Australia’s cultural cringe and anachronistic nationalism.

Benjamin, an accomplished art historian, offers a polished narrative balanced by his unwavering sense of content, form, and cultural value. He takes us to the heart of 1950s optimism set within the national capital’s utopian framework and its fishbowl world of public servants and close-knit academics attached to the capital’s new university. We also encounter the best of European modernism within a bush setting when Bruce Benjamin, Roger’s philosopher father, commissioned a young refugee Czechoslovakian to design and oversee almost every detail of their new family home, the remarkable Round House at 10 Gawler Crescent. Thankfully, the house is now a protected heritage building, due to the custodianship of Roger, whose meticulous cataloguing of its history brings the spatial, functional, aesthetic, and textural properties of the building into sharp focus, while introducing an entourage of émigrés and individuals associated with the family and the construction of the building.

Like the spokes of a wheel, Jelinek’s Round House, based on a Pythagorean spiral, complements Walter Burley Griffin’s circular geometric layout of the city. Benjamin’s deftly researched study of Alex Jelinek illuminates the aesthetic foundations that shaped the young architectural student during the 1930s, when the interwar Czech modernist group Devêtsil, the counterpart to the Dutch De Stijl and Russian Constructivist movements, as well as Functionalism and the International Style, epitomised Europe’s own cultural revival. There Jelinek had flourished, until Stalin’s Soviet police state suppressed cultural freedom and forced his escape. We are told of his survival and arrival in Australia, and his employment with the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, which from 1949 was a magnet for many ‘new Australians’, including British, European, Mediterranean, and Eastern Bloc men. It sets the multicultural tone of this fascinating story.

Ross McMullin’s latest book Life So Full of Promise: Further biographies of Australia’s lost generation (2023) is his sequel to Farewell, Dear People (2012), which was awarded the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History. His previous biographies include Pompey Elliott (2002) and Will Dyson: Australia’s radical genius (2006). His political histories are The Light on the Hill (1991) and So Monstrous a Travesty: Chris Watson and the World’s first national labour government (2004). 

A quarter of a century has passed since Ivor Indyk contributed a scathing review of John Kinsella’s first collected poems to the pages of ABR (July 1997), and the contending responses to that opinion have typified the reception of his poetry among the vituperative local poetry community ever since. This extravagant representation of his work – two volumes of close to a thousand pages each, with a third volume pending – might seem almost deliberately designed to expose the author to similar criticism. Rather than a conventionally shaped collected edition, this is more like a throwing open of filing cabinets, and the nearly 1,700 pages presented so far are certainly not all masterpieces.

Yet the invitation of this sweeping collection provides the opportunity to consider the development of Kinsella’s writing from its raw earliest examples to the skilled technique evident in his current writing. Of course, there is too much of it: at times one is reminded of the Art Brut tendency to populate every space, or of Antonin Artaud at Rodez blackening page after page in a trance of graphomania. But whereas Artaud’s output was largely consumed by rats, Kinsella’s overproduction has been meticulously preserved, with scarcely a typo, in this university press edition. And it isn’t as if the author is unaware of how he might be received: one minor cut-up poem is titled (in quote-marks), ‘Careerism gone mad verging on hubris.’ Who said that, I wonder?

Each volume is furnished with an explanatory introduction, though these tend to be more anecdotal than analytic, as if resisting the task of summative criticism the work appears to solicit. Tony Hughes-d’Aeth draws attention to Kinsella’s depiction of the Western Australian wheatbelt landscape in the earlier work, while Ann Vickery concentrates on the foregrounding of domestic portraiture in the mature poems of Kinsella’s more settled middle period. But there is more going on at the level of both form and thematics than these brief sketches convey.

Although he began publishing at a relatively early age, Kinsella took some time to sift through his influences, and the first two hundred pages (the work criticised by Indyk) are the most dispensable here, though they provide useful guidance for later developments. The handful of poems published in the 1980s under the name of John Heywood are written mostly in the Deep Image style he may have encountered through his undergraduate studies with David Brooks at the University of Western Australia. Generally, this work draws on US poets gathered in Donald Hall’s Contemporary American Poetry (1962), rather than the more ‘open’ and radical strand anthologised by Donald M. Allen: James Dickey is a frequent reference point.

Herbariums are strange places. Part archive, part library, part museum collection, they hover in a space of plant, paper, print, and preservative. Time and space are pressed between pages representing far more than their often unprepossessing appearance suggests – complex interwoven stories of evolution, ecology, and scientific history. The herbarium is a compactus of shared and public scientific knowledge created by the collected efforts of men and women from diverse cultures, backgrounds and countries often unacknowledged and unknown, their identities subsumed to the multigenerational task of revealing the taxonomic architecture of plants, fungi, and algae.

Not everyone shares this perspective. Some might find a funny-smelling building filled with shrivelled plants slightly odd or intimidating. Not everyone shares the botanist’s fascination with the floral reproductive proclivities of plants or the intricacies of their leaf margins.

The Plant Thieves leans into the aesthetics of this world with a beautiful cover – inked annotations across the sepia tones of a pressed Mount Buffalo wattle. The image nostalgically references the long history of botanical artistry. The title, however, carries different connotations. It reminds me of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (2000), which gave rise to Charlie Kaufman’s tangentially metafictive movie Adaptation (2002). Perhaps this book is not what it seems after all.

Eminent ecological historian Libby Robin has produced a curious book that examines the changing interests and roles played by those Australians who ‘notice birds and feel they need our help’. She aims to examine the rise of the nature conservation movement in Australia, using ‘Australia’s bird-people’ as a sample of Australians with a love of nature.

The catchy title pays homage to Australia’s (and in some ways the world’s) first bird field guide, Neville Cayley’s bestselling What Bird Is That?, first published in 1931 and found in a remarkable proportion of Australian households thereafter. I wondered at the use of the term ‘birdo’, which, in my experience, is not widely used.

Robin identifies three groups of bird-people to illustrate the range of interests and involvement: amateur birdos; professional zoologists; and birdscapers, who deliberately provide habitat for birds in their gardens. Of course, these categories are not mutually exclusive; many birdos are also birdscapers, and professional zoologists are frequently all three.

Robyn Archer is a singer, performer, writer, artistic director, and public advocate of the arts. She was appointed an ABR Laureate in 2016. She has been performing professionally for more than sixty years, throughout Australia and the world, and is known internationally for her expertise in the Weimar repertoire and her artistic direction of major arts festivals.

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

Possibly a 1950s Nutcracker Ballet at Theatre Royal, Hindley Street, Adelaide. Dad took me there as a surprise – first time in the theatre. But as a twenty-something, Lindsay Kemp’s Flowers at the Valhalla in Glebe, Sydney.

When did you realise that you wanted to be an artist yourself?

Nil realisation. It just happened – I never had a chance. Dad was a singer, stand-up comic, and MC. I unconsciously apprenticed myself to him from the age of

Popular Western culture remains fascinated with the figure of the artist. This fascination is perhaps a more interesting object of study than the many depictions arising from it. The figure of the artist has been represented as predominantly masculine, replete with tics of grandiosity, addiction, and suffering. Cheesy and/or technically inadequate depictions of artistic process often attend. Artists are too often presented as savant thunderbirds unable to do the washing, let alone hang it out. How can such figures hope to solve complex conceptual and material creative problems? Such tropes can seem indestructible, causing domino effects of plot to swirl with tedious predictability.

Poststructuralism, postmodernism, and feminism have placed representations of the genius artist under pressure. Seminal feminist art historians such as Griselda Pollock and Linda Nochlin have inspired revisionist art histories and encouraged generations of women artists to move front and centre, creating art as acts of resistance to the dominant culture. Institutions and museums are also on watch to redress gender and race imbalances in their collections and in their scheduling of solo, group, and retrospective shows.

A scatter of novelists have contested simplistic tropes of creative identity. Notable works in the Australian sphere include Sue Woolfe’s The Painted Woman (1989) and Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2015). Internationally, Michel Houellebecq’s novel The Map and the Territory (2011), Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye (1988) and Marie Darrieussecq’s fictionalised biography Being Here: The life of Paula Modersohn Becker (2017) offer challenging portrayals of art ecosystems. Three new Australian novels consider the role of the artist with varying degrees of success.

Girl in a Pink Dress by Kylie Needham (Penguin, $27.99 hb, 188 pp) follows Woolfe’s novel in the sense of it being that rare Künstlerroman, a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Despite this début novel’s derivative title, Frances is an affecting character–narrator. Living in a lonely Sydney flat with her mother, she opines that art has always been ‘my company, my comfort, my free ticket to elsewhere …’ She reflects on Australian women artists sidelined throughout history, though this knowledge is never expressed.

Frances falls for her saturnine art lecturer Clem, who is classically mad, bad, and dangerous to know, a painter of De Kooningesque abstract expressionist lineage, while she is a landscapist, compelled by effects of light. The pair soon set up house in an old goldmining town, Bald Hill, escaping the gossipy intensities of the Sydney art scene, including those of Clem’s famous painter father, Albert. The truth that dare not speak its name is that Frances is likely more talented than the somewhat two-dimensional Clem. Nonetheless, Clem is ‘painting’s heir’ and his forthcoming solo show takes on that very anxiety-of-influence title, a grandiose
tag if ever there was one. What could possibly go wrong?

While Clem has insight into his bad-boy-of-the art-world PR, such images serve him financially and professionally. In poignant contrast, Frances settles for thirty per cent income from her disreputable gallerist. Given that most commercial gallerists commonly extract fifty per cent commissions, a return of thirty per cent is punitive, but Frances does not demur. Love alone speeds
her past such rampant exploitations.

Things turn rocky in the campagna when Frances is enlisted to paint in background and detail in Clem’s solo show paintings. Thus she nails her professional and personal coffin as both art assistant and muse. Clem, a painter of strewn female body parts, is averse to planning, drawing, and even underpainting, so his request for detailing perplexes the reader. As Clem instructs Frances in relation to her own paintings: ‘Just hit it with a first mark.’

The dramatic denouement at Bald Hill is striking, if reminiscent of a similar scene from Bitto’s The Strays. By the novel’s close, a mature Frances, still painting, makes peace with Clem’s accolades, too much peace perhaps. She notes Clem’s ‘impressive career’ without any of her earlier sharp insights into avant-garde clichés.

The Prize, by Kim E. Anderson (Pantera Press, $32.99 pb, 322 pp), is a début historical novel that revisits the 1943 Archibald Prize scandal, when portrait painter William Dobell was temporarily stripped of his prize win for his expressionistic portrait of Joshua Smith. Vexatious competitors Mary Edwards and Joseph Wolinski took the Art Gallery of New South Wales trustees to the Supreme Court of New South Wales, claiming that the winning painting was a caricature, not a portrait. Bizarrely, Dobell’s once willing sitter threw his lot in with the plaintiffs. The prosecuting barrister, and later chief justice of the High Court of Australia, was Garfield Barwick (he lost his argument that caricature and portraiture were distinct, but the case made his name). The proceedings were a distraction from World War II horrors; thousands flocked to court to leer at the portrait and await Justice Roper’s measured remarks. Roper ruled ultimately that the Dobell image bore a strong likeness to Smith and was in fact a portrait within the meaning of the words of the Archibald will. Fallout from the case, an ‘artistic Pearl Harbor’ in Anderson’s words, was devastating for both men; afterwards, they never met again.

The novel’s other dramatic driver is that Dobell and quite possibly Smith were gay men and likely lovers in socially conservative, homophobic Sydney. Both had worked as wartime camouflage painters, but notwithstanding any coded queer knowledge in Smith’s scant papers, Smith’s homosexuality is unconfirmed. Anderson takes a brave plunge and confidently presents Smith as Dobell’s lover of many years’ standing.

The novel is divided into two sections. The first twelve chapters laboriously domesticise Dobell and Smith’s relationship, through wonderful snapshots of cosmopolitan European refugee culture around Kings Cross punctuate domestic longueurs. Occasional technical anomalies arise as Dobell’s portrait of Smith is completed in a single sitting. That aside, there are simply too many cups of tea.

Dobell, confident and intelligent, was not a closeted gay man. Smith apparently was. Anderson describes Smith as intelligent and sensitive, but these qualities are not dramatised. Thus, the romance lacks credible erotic or emotional charge. Smith comes across as a sniping mummy’s boy. Even the sitter of Smith’s 1943 Archibald portrait, Dame Mary Gilmore, snaps at him in a rousing cameo as she drives the artist to court:

‘Oh Joshua do grow up and stop whining,’ snapped Mary. […] ‘Dobell is a master,’ she said. ‘His portraits are captivating, darling.
I like them. It is not meant to be an exact likeness. That is old school.’

What doesn’t come across is that Smith himself was an excellent painter, as his portrait of Gilmore (runner-up in the 1943 Prize) and uncanny Group Portrait (1942) attest. Smith went on to win the 1944 Archibald Prize for his portrait of John Solomon Rosevear.

The novel really takes off midway as a compelling courtroom drama that brings to life a fascinating event in Australian cultural history. Here, Anderson deftly plumbs legal, journalistic, and cultural archives as dynamic scenework.  No mean feat, though she makes us wait.

Prize culture also features in Che’s Last Embrace (Arcadia, $ 32.95 pb, 176 pp) by Nicholas Hasluck. Hasluck’s fourteenth novel is a meticulously researched account of revolutionary South American politics, focusing on Che Guevara’s efforts to foment broader South American revolution. Moving between past and present, the circuitous plot hinges on the supposed existence of Guevara rebel and journalist Marvic Laredo, aka El Australiano, whose Australian forebears founded the utopian socialist community in 1890s Paraguay. Laredo’s writings open the novel, and the reader quickly learns that the archive, like Guevara’s death, may not be what it seems.

The thriller shades are focalised by Australian archaeologist Ian, working on the restoration of Jesuitical missions in the Chiquitos region outside La Paz. He is being mentored by a distinguished, rather Graham Greeneish archaeologist known as ‘The Maestro’. Mysterious contacts, often untrustworthy barflies or jaded journalists, crop up as recognisable, enjoyable genre types, all poised to help Ian come closer to the man or myth that was/is Marvic Laredo.

Strangely, we never see Ian or The Maestro at work. There is a lot of café sitting and authoritative disquisitions on truth, memoir, politics, and art. But no digging or restoring. An art subplot soon appears, explaining Ian’s persistent interrogation of old revolutionary intrigues. Back in Australia, Ian’s ‘argumentative’, ‘excitable’ sister Anita is out to win a prize designed, implausibly, to sit on the entablature of the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Determined to fashion a sculptural likeness of Marvic Laredo, Anita hounds her brother via email to confirm Laredo’s heroic identity. Meanwhile, the Maestro, ever a paternalistic brother in arms, shores up Ian’s perception of his sister as ‘impulsive’, ‘talkative’, and as someone who may not know what she is doing. Anita, differently mad, bad, and dangerous to know, is set in contradistinction to the methodical, rational mien of the sober, male archeological researcher.

Anita is only developed through occasional emails to her brother. Former Guevara rebel Canela Dochera is given more nuance, but she, unlike Anita, appears in active scenes. The novel potentially succeeds as a political–historical thriller, butted up against an unconvincing art narrative and a main character who, inexplicably, gives up his day job to research his sister’s ‘weird’ project.
Art can do that to you.