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Nemesis

Dear Editor,

Thanks for an excellent review of Nemesis (ABR, March 2023). This is exactly what I felt when watching the documentary series. It too readily accepted the narrow terms of reference of its subjects, which serve them well and the viewer rather more poorly. The real context is not who had it in for whom, but what was at stake for Australians. And that involves addressing policy with more seriousness than these former politicians could muster.

Misha Ketchell

Gurrelieder

Dear Editor,

In response to Malcolm Gillies’ comment on my performance in Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (ABR Arts and page 56): first, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra hired an opera singer – me – to do the Sprecher, not an actor. Second, Schoenberg wrote all the speaker’s notes. Presumably he didn’t do this for fun or in the expectation that no attention would be paid to the pitches as notated.

Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths has no introduction, but Matthew Lamb describes it in his author’s note as ‘the first in a projected two-volume cultural biography of Frank Moorhouse’, covering the long writing apprenticeship of 1938–74 during which Moorhouse ‘br[oke] into the literary establishment, on his own terms’. Lamb does not explain his use of the term ‘cultural biography’ within the book, but the term is apt to describe how ‘biography intersects with social history’ as the book tracks Moorhouse’s ‘negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments’ (as Lamb puts it in an article on the Penguin website titled ‘“When the facts conflict with the legend”  – How does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?’).

On a fatherhood weekend, the men drag
a dead manna gum, chained to a ute, into camp.
They’re talking innocence. Is it inborn, or clad
layer by layer by behaviour? Around the grey stump
the men start chainsaws and crack beers, open
a phone (there’s reception), search innocence definition.
Blamelessness. Chastity. Childhood. But also
integrity, which means innocence. The confusion
– that integrity means wholeness too –
heats up when one man says he heard children
arrive with sin. Then two-stroke fumes
drown the twilight bush’s scat-and-pepper scents.
They cut it. Some of the men scream, some don’t,
when spiders erupt from the warm hollow.

The Journal of Australian Political Economy (JAPE) recently published a special issue to mark the (presumed) halfway point of the Albanese Labor government. There was an editorial and nineteen articles. As you would expect, the verdict was mixed. The most striking thing to me, however, was that the authors had enough material to work with. A similar exercise for the Abbott and Morrison governments would have produced the problem faced by Old Mother Hubbard. The Turnbull government might just have provided her poor doggy with a bone, but one without much meat on it.

In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Remarkably, Ukraine fought an effective, close-run defensive campaign and the war turned into a quagmire for Vladimir Putin’s regime. As early as the following month, with the appalling revelations from Bucha of Russian atrocities, it was clear that this was – as they all are – a very dirty war. At the time of writing, the frontline exists in precarious stalemate and serious questions loom about the reliability of ongoing US-led material support, which is necessary for Ukraine to continue the resistance.

In the title piece of this posthumous selection of reviews, criticism, essays, and journalism, Hilary Mantel describes how she once visited an irritating psychic she nicknamed ‘Twerp’ in order to guide her back to her former self: ‘I didn’t necessarily think I had a past life, but I wanted to know how it would feel if I did.’ Her former self turns out to have been a ‘miserable illegitimate infant’ called Sara, born to a family of millworkers in the north of England. Sara isn’t an unlikely candidate: Mantel’s mother worked in a cotton mill from the age of fourteen, as did her maternal grandmother, who left school aged twelve; Mantel’s great-grandmother had been illiterate. Mantel comes from ‘a long line of nobodies’. All that ‘Twerp’ wants to ask Sara is whether or not she is courting, when the real love of Sara’s life is Billy, her white bull terrier. ‘If Sara had slapped him,’ Mantel wonders, ‘what sort of a defence would I have had to a charge of assault?’

That doctors aren’t supposed to become incurably ill is something their patients might say, and about as useless as declaring that dentists are forbidden from contracting toothache or that undertakers should live forever – seeing other people out, not themselves.

For Peter Goldsworthy – eminent novelist, poet, librettist, and an Adelaide general practitioner for more than forty years – the notion of being diagnosed with multiple myeloma (cancer of the plasma cells) was as unthinkable as it was putatively unethical. Even Hippocrates himself (so it was said) didn’t die until his late nineties, of causes unknown. Goldsworthy was at least thirty years short of that when, in August 2018, he had an MRI scan for a severe knee problem. The radiologist called him into the office to inspect the images: bone oedema, knee-replacement suggested. ‘There might be another problem,’ the radiologist continued. ‘The bone marrow. Looks a bit odd. It might be multiple myeloma.’

Reading for this review I came across some apposite words by Jacqueline Rose, biographer of Sylvia Plath, cultural analyst and explorer of the lives and roles of women:

I have never met a single mother (myself included) who is not far more complex, critical, at odds with the set of clichés she is meant effortlessly to embody, than she is being encouraged – or rather instructed – to think.

(Mothers: An essay on love and cruelty, 2018)

It is a virtue of Rachel Trethewey’s triple-headed study of three fascinating women, Julia Jackson/Stephen, Clara Boehmer/Miller and Aurelia Schober/Plath, that one never underestimates their complexity and power (or impotence) – as agents, lovers, wives, writers, teachers, and mothers. Their stories – as Trethewey tells them – intricate webs of family and social history, make for compelling reading, and would even if the three had not been the mothers of Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Sylvia Plath. But whether these women were the singular shapers, the ‘mothers of the minds’ of their famous daughters – that is another question.

Novelists and historians alike must choose how to tell their story. They may prefer a traditional authoritative voice, recounting the story in chronological order. Events surprise or shock as they unfold on the page, arriving at an apparently inevitable conclusion. This familiar organising principle holds our attention, but comes with constraints. Material must make sense within the timeline, or the narrative stalls. Think of Tolstoy’s long digression on farming in Anna Karenina or Hugo on constructing the sewers of Paris in Les Misérables, as we wait impatiently for Jean Valjean to flee the barricades.

Back in the 1970s, when I went up to Katerina Clark’s place in Connecticut for the weekend, I was always a bit on my guard. Katerina was a wonderful and generous friend, but inquisitive. Being young, I had things in my personal life I wanted to hide. A silent tussle went on between us as she did her best to ferret them out (probably knowing from her other sources more or less what they were) and I stone-walled.

I would date our friendship from this time, when I was in New York, working at Columbia University, and Katerina was teaching at Wesleyan in Middleton, CT. But we had already had thirty years of roughly parallel, sometimes interconnecting lives, and always knew about each other’s progress, thanks to the parental grapevine. The parents were Manning and Dymphna Clark and Brian and Dorothy (‘Doff’) Fitzpatrick, both fathers Australian historians, and all four Melbourne University Arts graduates who, in the 1940s, were part of the local left-wing intelligentsia. Katerina and I were born within sixteen days of each other, in Melbourne hospitals just a few miles apart, in June 1941. Both mothers liked to tell the story of how they were still in hospital on the fateful day, June 22, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Dymphna’s story was presumably literally true, while Doff must be forgiven some poetic licence, unless a two-week stay in hospital after a normal delivery was common in the 1940s.

Murray Middleton’s début novel, No Church in the Wild, opens beneath Flemington’s public housing towers in inner-city Melbourne. Residents of the towers flood the street to witness the police arrest a group of children ‘pinned on the concrete, knees digging into their spines’. One of these observers is Ali, a grade six primary school student. Ali recognises a Somali friend of his, Walid, as one of the boys under arrest. From Ali’s perspective, it is the latest provocation in a months-long campaign of police harassment against the local African migrant community. When things escalate and police direct the observers to leave, Ali responds: ‘Why should we? ... We live here.’ As the first of five parts, this opening scene is prologue to the action of the novel, which takes place five years later as Ali and Walid embark on their final years of schooling amid a community still suffering from problematic police interactions.

Tunde, a photographer and art professor at Harvard, attempts to photograph a hedge in his neighbourhood in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Waved away by a white property owner suspicious of a Black man on his street, Tunde tries again midway through Teju Cole’s new novel, Tremor, but, trusting his feeling of unease, leaves. (One is put in mind of the notorious 2009 incident in which neighbours reported Henry Louis Gates Jr for trying to force open his own Cambridge front door.) It is not until the final pages that Tunde returns to the scene and tries again, in the dead of night, after a party he has hosted with his partner, Sadako. The first exposure is too bright, the second too inky; too much is in frame, then not enough. Finally, he makes what he believes might be a successful image. Makes not takes; the difference is significant.

When Georgia Blain died at the age of fifty-one in 2016, the reading public was robbed of a superb prose writer in her prime. Her final and, some consider, best novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), achieved wide critical acclaim. Shortly after Blain succumbed to brain cancer, that novel went on to win or be shortlisted in a slew of national prizes.

As readers, we are fortunate to have two posthumously published books. The Museum of Words (2017) was a compilation of reflections, part memoir, part essaying of the writing life, written after Blain was diagnosed with Stage 4 Glioblastoma Multiforme. Her previous non-fiction title, Births Deaths Marriages (2008), tellingly explored a brother’s schizophrenia and subsequent death, and her father’s swings from charm to abuse – though Blain never wallowed in trauma or self-pity, and was also happy to muse, for example, on the joys of dog ownership. The Museum of Words examined her mother Anne Deveson’s drift into dementia, the illness of her friend Rosie, and her own confrontation with sickness and mortality. As many will know, Deveson died three days after Blain.

There has been talk in recent years about so-called Indigenous Futurism. Referencing Afro-Futurism, futurist fiction that imagines a new postcolonial Africa, the Indigenous version imagines a postcolonial world for Indigenous people, a future where the world is the way it should always have been. One quirk, however, is that Indigenous Futurism leans on Indigenous notions of time, an eternal now in which past and future are mere directions. Writers of Indigenous Futurism know that it’s not only possible to imagine the future and the past at the same time, but that it is part of cultural practice.

A feminist triumph and homage to Virginia Woolf, Miranda Darling’s Thunderhead is a potent exploration of suburban entrapment for women. The novella opens with a complex satire of Ian McEwan’s response to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925) in his novel Saturday (2005). All three books are set over the course of a single day, where the intricacies of both the quotidian and extraordinary occur. In this novella’s opening paragraphs, Darling’s protagonist, Winona Dalloway, wakes to see the sky ablaze through her window. While ‘it is dawn in the suburbs of the east’ – rather than a burning plane, evoking 9/11 terrorism, as in McEwan’s novel – she believes it ‘telegraphs a warning, red sky in the morning’. This refers to the opening of Mrs Dalloway, where Clarissa Dalloway feels, ‘standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen’.

Over the years the popularity of short fiction has fluctuated greatly, for mysterious reasons. A senior publisher once told me that publishers loved short fiction collections but that the reason they rarely published them was due to booksellers’ reluctance to support them. When I put this to a major bookseller, they claimed it was the other way around.

Since writers keep writing stories, perhaps the blame lies at the feet of readers? Or certain types of readers. Conspicuously, these three new collections come from independent publishers whose readers are unlikely to be found browsing the shelves at Big W. But they all contain such strong examples of the form it is hard to see why it seems continually under threat.

Warwick Sprawson’s first collection, We Will Live and Then We Will See, delivers a standout in its title story. Set in Russia and slyly exploiting perennial misinformation about the death of Vladimir Putin, it focuses on a presidential double, who is an unwilling conscript as his official stand-in. The story’s relevance was reinforced when news of Alexei Navalny’s death shocked the world, yet it maintains a light touch, allowing its full horror to sink in via implication. ‘Bouzouki’ recounts a history of interactions with an elderly Greek neighbour in a restrained, almost bland, narrative voice that controls the emotions yet allows us to feel much.

While stories such as these reward rereading, some of the shorter stories suffer due to the very brevity they embrace. ‘A for Australia, A for Alive’ and ‘Heroes’ both end just as they become interesting; and ‘The War on Cheese’, while clever and funny, relies too heavily on one idea.

Overall, the collection is engaging and quirky although it sometimes flirts with the gimmicky. Alice Munro and George Saunders aside, no short story writer can achieve perfection every time, so it is unfair to expect total consistency across a collection, and Sprawson’s best pieces are extremely good indeed. If you get the sense that he doesn’t take himself too seriously, this is confirmed at the end: the author biography offering ten alternative short paragraphs is more suited to a student anthology.

There is nothing wrong in having fun with fiction. Allen C. Jones’s Big Weird Lonely Hearts, takes humour to another level: the entire collection plays with images, ideas, and language. Many stories negotiate arbitrary shifts of scene and action as Jones leaps from one surreal moment to the next, disregarding the fact that we might actually want to believe in the bizarre, not to mention care about his characters’ fates.

‘The Last Tiger in the World’ is an example of how readers will readily accept an implausible premise (as they do in Kafka’s Metamorphosis), but not if the voice is misjudged or the story tips into the preposterous. Here a child is told that her missing mother has gone to Paris when in fact she has been eaten by the tiger in her family zoo; it all works until the part about the tiger’s tail tasting like nougat and being shaved and sold as cotton candy (after which the story gets decidedly weird). Other stories concern a woman who discovers a clitoris on the back of her knee (not the most surreal thing in the story); a man who resembles a bush; a boy with a computer screen for a face; and an illegal immigrant mermaid.

Small doses: that’s probably the best approach for these random stories. Amid them is one that is so ridiculously compelling it almost eclipses the rest. Exploiting the classic trope of dog-cat enmity, ‘A Mexican Legend’ manages to be hilarious, inventive, silly, and utterly endearing. It is emblematic of the entire collection: everyone – or everything – just wants to belong, to be loved. Hence the collection’s title.

Perhaps the gravity of Catherine McNamara’s The Carnal Fugues is more marked by comparison with these first two books, but her stories are undeniably striking. A selection from three previous collections, all published in the United Kingdom, the book seems a bold punt for Puncher & Wattman, but it is reassuring to see such faith being invested in an author.

The first story is a strong start to the collection. Set on a boutique tourist boat in the Mediterranean, ‘Adieu, Mon Doux Rivage’ is memorable for its unpredictable characters and razor-sharp narrative voice: a man’s tattoos are described as ‘busty women who seem to be feasting upon his physique’. This is only on the second page. The rest of the stories (there are forty-two in all) feature diverse characters in diverse locations – London, Mali, Paris, Berlin, Athens, Verona – yet there is also a distinct thematic coherence in their focus on the ruthlessly transactional nature of relationships, a coherence all the more impressive given that the stories are drawn from three separate books.

McNamara’s characters, desperate and duplicitous, fuelled by illicit desires and poor decisions, are often unafraid to reveal their worst selves. The narrator of ‘Young British Man Drowns in Alpine Lake’ confesses to being aroused by his girlfriend’s history of sexual abuse. Another male narrator gets hard when he overhears his brother and fiancée fighting. Risk-taking is high on the agenda: ‘Hôtel de Californie’ is infused with tension as a man conducts liaisons that are ‘fragrant with doom’ in a country where homosexuality is forbidden.

Several stories are set in West or North Africa. In one of these, ‘The Cliffs of Bandiagara’, a journalist and photographer drive through Mali to visit a famous musician for an English magazine interview. Despite the self-interested and morally feeble adult characters, the story remains curiously non-judgemental thanks to a documentary style and shifting point of view. A dearth of personal names – ‘the boyfriend’, ‘the journalist’, ‘the boy’ – injects a fabulous quality to the story, yet the only lesson it might contain is that everyone has their secret agenda, even a child.

‘Magaly Park’, one of the few stories set in Australia, introduces a voyeuristic narrator ostensibly spying on a teenage schoolgirl. Unease dissipates as we learn that the narrator is her boyfriend, waiting for her mother to allow her a few minutes to meet him: ‘There are [days] when we sit like two old people who have no mirrors in the house because each is a reflection of the other.’ Amid their tender patience, neither wishes for any more intimacy than this.

The very short stories, or flash fictions, are accomplished, but their brevity cannot compete with the layered intensity of the longer ones. Like Sprawson’s, some end with a sense of frustrating prematurity. One of these, ‘The Mafia Boss Who Shot His Gay Son in a Beach’, is essentially encapsulated in the title. An exception is ‘Banking’, which, in less than three pages, charts the demise of a relationship and its accompanying acts of revenge with an ending that is neither too neat nor too ambiguous, allowing our imagination to supply the rest.

McNamara writes in arresting prose and uses vivid descriptive detail: an old, decrepit man has ‘towed his own body for years now’; another, younger more cocksure man, seems to his aunt to be glowing with a ‘strategic, masculine beauty’. Intriguing and cosmopolitan, her stories are infused with historical weight and a worldly wisdom suggestive of timeless, even epic, narrative. They also reflect a keenly observant, well-travelled life (McNamara has lived and worked in France and West Africa, and currently runs a writing retreat in Italy.) A serious reader disregards cover comments, no matter how glowing or prestigious, but Hilary Mantel’s endorsement of McNamara’s stories is thoroughly apt.

The gods of the Greeks are uniquely anthropomorphic; they are not only imagined with human bodies but with thoughts and feelings largely similar to our own, except for the fact that they cannot grow old or die, and are thus spared the greatest part of human pain and suffering. They can feel anger at the misbehaviour, or pity for the fate, of mortals, as when Zeus sees that his beloved son Sarpedon is about to be slain (Iliad 16.431 ff.), but compared to us, they ‘live at ease’ (Odyssey 5.122 and elsewhere).

Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.

Few terms capture the imagined structure of European history as succinctly, and aptly, as ‘the Middle Ages’. Whether the era is being invoked fondly, casually, or with deep disdain, the term at once offers a comprehensive, normative account of civilisation and casts aspersions on those out of sync with it. It was designed to do just that. ‘The Middle Ages’ inserts itself as an antithesis between two seemingly cohesive periods: Antiquity and the Renaissance (the latter soon to be replaced by Enlightenment and then Modernity). It thus creates continuity by underscoring rupture, and stresses similarity through difference. Despite the era’s appeal to the Romantics and nascent nationalism in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, respectively, its poor reputation has been steady: from Jules Michelet’s quip about ‘the Middle Ages’ being ‘one thousand years without a bath’, to Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, where Marsellus Wallace famously vows ‘to get medieval’ on his torturer’s ass.

Fat chance. A million to one. Buckley’s. We’ve all come across bizarre tales of survival that defy belief. Take the case of sixty-year-old Hiromitsu Shinkawa, found floating ten miles out to sea, clinging to the roof of his house, days after a tsunami wiped out his home town in the Fukushima prefecture of Japan in 2011. What were the odds?

Shinkawa doesn’t feature in Kent MacCarter’s Fat Chance, but plenty of other such stories do, recounted in the form of ‘journalism poems’. But, just as MacCarter’s poems are festooned with chance survivals, so too are they drawn to chance endings. Case in point: Akbar Salubiro, the twenty-five-year-old Indonesian farmer who, in 2017, was swallowed whole by a reticulated python, the first such recorded incident of its kind. Pure bad luck? MacCarter’s supplemental note that ‘the tropical biota of Indonesia has lost 0.84 hectares of primary forest and predator habitat per year since 2000, significantly outpacing deforestation in Brazil’ gives reason for pause. Added to which, Akbar’s wife learnt of his death watching television ‘while eating snake bean salad’, a sting in the tail if ever there was one.

Even in his first publication, the seven short stories of the rightly celebrated The Boat (2008), Nam Le was perhaps always most interested in creating an aura of violent unpredictability. He withheld consistency, offered cruxes, hit the reader with a blizzard of bold plots in settings so varied as to be practically contradictory – Hiroshima, Medellin, New York City, a fishing town on the Queensland coast. Where, as in the title story, Nam Le appears to relent and writes about what may have been his own experience (he was ferried to Australia as an infant), the baby dies. He is like a package determined not to contain what it says on the disclosure form; a letter that won’t be delivered to the stated address.

David Brooks (University of Queensland Press)David Brooks, critic, novelist, short story writer, animal rights activist as well as poet, taught Australian Literature, ran a writing program, and co-edited Southerly at the University of Sydney. He has published six collections of poetry, the latest (The Peanut Vendor) included in his new and selected poems: The Other Side of Daylight (UQP, 2024). He lives in the Blue Mountains with rescued sheep and advocates for kangaroos. The Sydney Morning Herald called his The Balcony (UQP, 2007) ‘an electrical experience’.

Which poets have influenced you most?

Galway Kinnell, Czesław Miłosz, Ezra Pound, Li Po, Bruce Beaver.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Most of my poems begin with inspiration, but then are crafted. It’s taken a lifetime to learn that craft. I’m still learning.

What prompts a new poem?

An event, a memory, a thought, an image, or some trigger in someone else’s poem. Often there’s a kind of inner signal, a feeling something is coming. Sometimes when I’d like to write a poem but don’t have anything in particular in mind, I ask myself, If I were going to write a poem, what might it be about? and, Bingo, I’m in.

What circumstances are ideal for writing poetry?

Silence, darkness, calm, a good sleep the night before, freedom from distraction.

Roughly how many drafts do you produce before ‘finishing’ a poem?

In earlier years quite a few, dozens sometimes. But the internal editor gets better with time. I’m needing less and less, doing more drafting in my head before setting anything down. Some poems now come almost fully formed. I’m getting better at doing what the poem wants, rather than trying to get it to do what I want it to.

Which poet would you most like to talk to – and why?

Some great poets can be spiky and defensive in person. I’d prefer someone who’s actually pleasant to talk with, and you can only be confident about that if you’ve already talked with them, so I’ll say Mark Strand, who was pleasant and generous and whom I still find myself talking to, occasionally, in my mind. Or Bruce Beaver. Or Jan Harry. Wise and generous beings.

Do you have a favourite Australian poetry collection?

Several, but I’ll name just five: Robert Adamson’s Where I Come From, Jenny Rankin’s Earth Hold, J.S. Harry’s A Dandelion for Van Gogh, Coral Hull’s Bestiary, Bruce Beaver’s Odes and Days.

What do poets need most: solitude or a coterie?

Solitude, though I’m conscious there are two or three living poets whose friendship is important to me, and that I converse with a coterie of dead poets much of the time. Amazing how poets continue to see, think, feel, and speak long after they’ve died.

Who are the poetry critics you most admire?

It’s probably impolitic to choose from the living. My sense overall is that the public discourse surrounding poetry is getting better and better and that some strong new voices are emerging. But in truth I’m no longer the person to ask. The bulk of my reading is now in and for animal advocacy. The poetics of that are very important. Were there more critics working in that area, or receptive to poets who are, I might be reading criticism more.

If Plato allowed you to keep one poem or poetry collection in his Republic, what would it be?

I’d once have said Strand and Charles Simic’s Another Republic anthology, or Pound’s Cathay. Now it’s Classical Chinese Poetry, translated and edited by David Hinton.

What is your favourite line of poetry?

Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal…

from ‘Briggflatts’ by Basil Bunting.

How can we inspire greater regard for poetry among readers?

Thinking about them a bit more. Keeping it clear, simple, entertaining. Letting the images do the talking. Remembering the power of narrative. Leaving one’s cleverness at the door.

‘In the year of my birth, trichotillomania did not exist,’ writes Adele Dumont. Hair-pulling has been depicted in human culture for millennia: in Greek myth, in the Bible, in painting and sculpture, and, most commonly, in vernacular expression (‘I’m tearing my hair out’). But hair-pulling as a compulsive, recurring behaviour – trichotillomania – was only named in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1987. Formal psychiatric diagnosis has become the dominant means by which we understand emotional distress, but this has happened very recently, and diagnosis can leave the sufferer, as Dumont writes, feeling ‘categorised’ and struggling to articulate those aspects of their illness that may seem, in spite of everything, like comfort.

Dumont has suffered from trichotillomania since adolescence, and The Pulling is her exploration of both the condition and her own experience. This is billed as a book of essays, though it is really a memoir in chapters, beginning with reminiscences of an itinerant, unorthodox early childhood and proceeding through to the present, where the author remains perplexed, and preoccupied, by her ongoing illness. The early chapters are by far the most vivid and varied; as the book goes on its repetitions come to mirror the narrowing effects of Dumont’s condition, and the ways in which it confines her to a set of careful, and brittle, routines.

Dumont’s parents worked as fruit pickers, ‘moving from farm to farm according to the seasons’ before settling on the semi-rural fringes of Sydney’s west in order to give Dumont and her younger sister a steady education. Her father, born in the Alsace region of France, is phlegmatic, bookish, self-educated; Dumont observes that he ‘belongs to an age’ where mental illness – alcoholism, for instance – was understood to be a personality trait. It is perhaps for this reason that Papa, as Dumont calls him, remains unflappable in the face of Mama’s more volatile temperament, her ‘unrelenting tears, and yelling that would last hours into the night’.

By Dumont’s own admission, her parents, and their strict anti-materialist values, still shape her engagement with the world. She clearly loves and admires them, and her confession late in the book of ‘deep shame … that my life feels so much easier’ will ring true for any reader whose opportunities have been greater than their caregivers’ were. But the trouble at the heart of this family escapes the author’s knowing, just as the reasons for her illness do; Dumont never asks her mother what has tormented her all these years. Few of us would ask, to be fair: confronting a parent with their own frailties is a thing most children, including adult children, find frightening, for to be reminded of a parent’s weaknesses is also to remember their mortality. If that parent is already frightening, the task may seem impossible.

In the absence, then, of explanations, Dumont repeatedly turns to description of the mechanics and rituals that characterise her hair-pulling, the self-imposed rules that she sets (and then breaks) when attempting to stop, and the lengths she has gone to, over decades, to conceal her illness from nearly everyone. I’m not sure these repetitions – of scene, of subject – are entirely intentional: they never quite rise to the level of an explicit design. The back and forth feels more like a writer in search of an ultimate expression of purpose, one that keeps eluding her precisely because, as Dumont writes, at the heart of her illness and its trance-like episodes ‘remains something unknowable; a thing sublime’.

The idea of sublimity – Dumont also refers to it as ‘magic’ – hints at a more expansive, more ancient understanding of mental illness, or what we once may have called ‘madness’, than our current times generally allow for. Dumont does not glorify her illness, but nor does she seek to reduce it to a set of symptoms, or to a chemical imbalance in the brain. The Pulling is mercifully free of the jargon of neuroscience, and Dumont’s insistence on non-medical phenomena as a part of her experience is the book’s most original aspect.

In light of this, I find it strange that Dumont so often second-guesses her reader, as if, despite her own multifaceted conception of illness, she can only conceive of one type of reaction. ‘Before I go on,’ she warns early, ‘let me say that the chapters that follow this one may be hard for you to bear.’ But why would that be so? Dumont’s subject may be difficult, but there is nothing that makes her presentation of it difficult, let alone unbearable. Her prose is sober and diligent, possibly too diligent: there were moments when I longed for an outburst of bad taste or impetuosity, of humour of any sort. The impulse to get ahead of the reader’s presumed disgust or bewilderment, and to deflect it, seems to rest on the assumption that bewilderment, disgust, or shock are provoked by one’s subject and not by one’s style. All I can say is that I have read more shocking things about far more trivial subjects, and I don’t need to be coddled.

Repeated deference to the ‘you’ is then confused, towards the end of the book, when the ‘you’ changes shape: ‘To be able to write any of this I had to pretend that you – you, my mother – would never set eyes on it.’ After 260 pages, are we now to assume that the reader Dumont is so anxious not to upset has been her mother all along? This would make emotional sense, though on a technical level it would leave things in a muddle, with Mama at once a third-person figure and the subject of a direct, second-person address. But I think there are two ‘you’s’ here: the parent whom Dumont has never been able to appease, and the reader in whom she seeks companionship. The split is interesting, and one of many that Dumont has documented in this book.

During a recent lunar eclipse, I marvelled as Earth’s shadow nibbled away the Moon’s light. This creeping shadow testified to the awesome movement of the celestial spheres, Earth inching along its trajectory around the Sun while the Moon fell around Earth until, on this special night, all three bodies were closely aligned in the same plane: Sun, Earth, Moon. A related alignment occurs each month, when the Sun’s light is reflected from the full, uninterrupted Moon. We can see it because the Moon orbits Earth in a slightly different plane from that of Earth’s motion around the Sun. But on this night, the Moon was passing through a point where these two planes intersected, so that Earth directly blocked the light from Sun to Moon.

This volume brings together two highly credentialled thinkers about moral and ethical matters: Peter Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, and Venerable Shih Chao-Hwei, a Taiwanese Buddhist nun, founder of the animal welfare organisation the Life Conservation Association and the Buddhist Hong-Shi College, as well as a lecturer at Hsuan Chuang University.

Peter Singer is Australia’s best-known philosopher. An atheist and a utilitarian, he is most famous for extending the utilitarian ideal – often understood to be the greatest good for the greatest number, but described by Singer as the ‘greatest possible benefit’ – to all sentient beings. Shih Chao-Hwei was born in Myanmar, after her family’s flight from China following the rise of communism, and moved to Taiwan at an early age. After exploring Buddhism at university, she was ordained as a Bhikshuni – a nun – in a Mahayana Buddhist tradition, which (like most forms of Buddhism) is known for its strong ethical standpoints and its aversion to killing. Chao-Hwei belongs to an international network associated with the term Engaged Buddhism, which was coined by the Vietnamese monk Thích Nhất Hạnh (who was not the fourteenth Dalai Lama as the book’s prelims suggest). Engaged Buddhism, a modern Buddhist ecumenical movement, aims to connect Buddhist teachings and practitioners to social justice issues. Chao-Hwei has been a vocal advocate in Taiwan for the rights of women, LGBTQI+ communities, and animal liberation.

An anthology dedicated to the transnational history of psychedelic drugs and culture seems a timely enterprise. We are twenty or so years into what has become known as the ‘psychedelic renaissance’, the global revival of interest in compounds such as LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin centring on their use alongside psychotherapy as treatments for a growing number of mental health disorders.

Previous books which have both documented and shaped this revival – most notably Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind (2018) – have recalled the history of the psychotherapeutic use of psychedelics dating back to the 1950s, but largely through a Western-centric lens. Expanding Mindscapes seeks to redress this imbalance by offering what editors Erika Dyck and Chris Elcock call in their introduction ‘perspectives currently lacking in the historiography of psychedelics’ and ‘important discussions on hitherto underexplored or untouched topics such as gender, parapsychology, anarchism, and technological innovation’.  

Ian DicksonIan Dickson reviews theatre and books for ABR and is the co-author of the musical Better Known As Bee. As a schoolboy, visiting London in the 1960s to catch Saturday matinees, Ian developed his obsession with the performing arts, which followed him through degrees at the University of NSW and Yale. A lifetime spent one way or another around the theatre has made him understand the importance of the critic to make a record of that most ephemeral art.

When did you first write for ABR?

June 2013, when I reviewed Richard Davis’s biography of Marjorie Lawrence.

What makes a fine critic?

The critic must have a real knowledge and understanding of what they are reviewing. Although there are critics, including, apparently, a certain former British prime minister, who can write hilarious put-downs of works they haven’t bothered to read or see, it’s more useful to the reader if the critic has some connection to the work reviewed.

We should get some sense of a critic’s personality from their writing. To be a critic is, by definition, to have opinions. No one approaches a book or a play as a blank slate. While one would not want a critic to be completely predictable, it helps to know where they are coming from.

They should have a passion for their subject and the ability to transmit that passion to their readers. Over the years, I have discovered countless writers, musicians, and artists about whom I knew nothing, thanks to the advocacy of reviewers.

A fine critic must also be a fine writer.

Which critics most impress you?

I grew up in England following Kenneth Tynan, who seemed dazzling at the time. Reading him now I find he hasn’t dated that well. For poetry I read Helen Vendler. For practically anything I read Clive James. I learned an enormous amount from music critic Andrew Porter’s erudite, enthusiastic work, a tradition which Alec Ross is continuing at the New Yorker. I am not a great fan of dance, but Arlene Croce had the ability to link even the most esoteric work to the outside world. Sticking with The New Yorker, Antony Lane’s razor-sharp wit and wide range of reference would have made him a welcome guest at the Algonquin round table. Finally, John McDonald’s uncompromising opinions are frequently a refreshing counterpoint in local discussions of the visual arts.

Do you accept most books offered you or are you selective?

I only decline a review if I feel I have no rapport with the writer or their subject or, as happened recently, I don’t think the book deserves a review.

What do you look for in an editor?

One who will correct my spelling, encourage me to clarify my more arcane comments, break up my interminable sentences, and not overdo the semi-colons. Also, one who supports, encourages, and challenges.

Do you write with a particular reader in mind?

Yes. One who, with fiendish delight, picks up any factual errors, evasions, or misunderstandings.

Hypocrite lecteur – mon paranoia – mon peur.

Do you receive feedback from readers or authors?

Yes, but mainly for theatre reviews, rarely for books. They are either: ‘Thank you for saying what we felt’ or ‘Did you go to the same play I went to?’ Whichever it is, it’s always good to know that there are readers who are committed enough to react.

What do you think of negative reviews?

If there weren’t negative reviews, positive reviews would be meaningless. Having said that, a negative review should treat the performers or writers seriously. Mockery is easy, cheap, and of no use to anyone.

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

To quote Bartleby, I would prefer not to.

How different, if at all, are theatre reviews from book reviews?

The difference is in the timing. One can spend weeks on a book review, but a theatre review is based on an instant reaction. I have huge respect for those critics who would phone in their reviews to their paper’s night editor minutes after the performance finished. The challenge with a theatre review is to develop a nuanced reaction in a short time.

What are a critic’s primary responsibilities?

A critic’s primary responsibilities are equally to their readers and to the performers or writers they are reviewing. To be clear and informative when addressing the former, and to be accurate and respectful when writing about the latter.

At last a spectacular tome for the many fans of Vincent Namatjira, one that will also win him new admirers. Originating from an exhibition at the Tarnanthi Festival and the Art Gallery of South Australia, this beautifully laid-out book from Thames & Hudson Australia captures the humour and intense vision of Namatjira’s career to date.

The fascination with Vincent Namatjira – Indigenous painter of figures, portraits, and lately landscape – lies in the way he twists the human visage to tell stories. (He fittingly won the Archibald Prize in 2020, with a portrait of former AFL player Adam Goodes.) He is not a caricaturist in the usual sense of the word, although caricature is invoked in his wry use of political figures, from Paul Keating to Donald Trump, Elizabeth II to Vladimir Putin. But unlike newspaper caricatures of such figures, Namatjira’s message is ambiguous. This is because it’s hard to tell if his distortions are deliberate, or result from his being ‘untrained’, like a latter-day Douanier Rousseau or fellow Iwantja artist Kaylene Whiskey. For me, they are deliberate in the way that Francis Bacon’s figures were made with deliberation. Bacon drew on pre-existing images, such as Velázquez’s painting of the pope, for his often grotesque, distorting reinterpretations. Photographs, be they snapshots of boyfriends or Muybridge’s wrestling men, were another great inspiration.

Louise Berta Mosson Dyer (née Smith; later Hanson-Dyer; hereafter, Louise) lived several lives. An eccentric Melbourne socialite, married into the money of Linoleum King, Jimmy Dyer, she moved on from the expectations of provincial charitable good works in her mid-forties to found a ground-breaking new publishing house in Paris. Les Éditions de l’Oiseau-Lyre, or the Lyrebird Press, pioneered innovative, daring editions – of music, books, and later, recordings – sometimes at the cutting edge of technology.

In August 1943, John F. Kennedy, then aged twenty-six, was rescued from the threat of Japanese captivity – or worse – by a few brave Solomon Islanders, in an operation coordinated by the Australian naval officer Reg Evans. Evans was one of the Royal Australian Navy’s ‘Coastwatchers’, intelligence collectors based perilously behind Japanese lines.

Kennedy had command of PT-109, a small wooden patrol torpedo boat that had been rammed and cut in half by a Japanese destroyer. For some days he inspired and led the survivors of his crew, swimming between three small islands in what is now the Western Province of Solomon Islands. There were thousands of Japanese troops in the offing, and back at the Americans’ base on the island of Rendova, JFK and his men had been given up for dead. Then Eroni Kumana and Biuku Gasa, two of Evans’s network of Islander scouts, came across them and paddled sixty kilometres through enemy lines to carry a message to Rendova. Evans made radio contact with the PT base and fine-tuned the subsequent rescue.

At the first Australian Conference on Transsexualism, convened in 1979, a Dr Michael Ross declared that Australia had the highest incidence of transsexualism in the world. Whatever proportion the good doctor was observing, it must be immeasurably higher today; and yet until now there has been no formal history of gender-diverse Australians.

On one level, this is no surprise. Gender dysphoria is a subjective experience, its sufferers tending to hide their pain, and some historians consider it anachronistic to label our predecessors according to contemporary social understandings, not least since terminology shifts every generation. Conscious of these pitfalls, Noah Riseman has made a good stab at a difficult topic.

Transgender Australia: A history since 1910 grew out of Riseman’s previous book, Pride in Defence (2020), in which he and co-author Shirleene Robinson transcribed the stories of queer Australians in the military. As in that work, Riseman’s use of oral histories allows a multitude of trans voices to take centre stage, and he structures them to recount a history that can be loosely divided into eras of criminalisation, sexualisation, medicalisation, and liberation.