The season of giving

Close readers of our Patrons page will note many new additions to this month’s listing, including several substantial donations. Some of these followed a Melbourne function on 1 May, at which ABR Editor Peter Rose, ABR Chair Sarah Holland-Batt, and ABR Laureate Robyn Archer all spoke. This was an opportunity for ABR to thank its many supporters and to highlight new developments and opportunities.

When the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club in March 2023 to savage the bipartisan commitment to acquire nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement, he did so only days after Anthony Albanese had stood alongside his British counterpart Rishi Sunak and US President Joe Biden in San Diego to announce the ‘optimal pathway’ for the agreement. Fluttering above them were the respective flags of the three nations. In the background lay berthed the USS Missouri, a Virginia class submarine lined with American sailors and festooned with its own bunting. But as Keating noted in typically pungent fashion, on that day ‘there was only one payer: the Australian prime minister … there’s three leaders standing there … [but] only one is paying … our bloke, Albo. The other two, they’ve got the band playing, happy days are here again.’

Happy days are most certainly not here again for AUKUS, especially for its Pillar One component, which envisages Australia acquiring between three and five US Virginia class submarines from the United States in the early 2030s, and then, from the early 2040s, eight new SSN-AUKUS submarines: British designed, partly Australian built, and with an American weapons and combat system. But the spectre of cost blowouts and production delays already haunts the agreement. The Australian government will hand over around $5billion to the British government over the next decade to subsidise an expansion of British submarine production capacity and a down payment on design work for the new SSN AUKUS. That comes on top of the $6.81 billion Canberra will be pay to Washington over the period 2024-33 to assist America’s submarine industrial production line

The opening pages of Knife give an account of the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie at a speaking engagement in upstate New York on 12 August 2022. His assailant charged out of the audience and onto the stage, where he attacked the author, using one of several knives he had brought along, for exactly twenty-seven seconds. Rushdie is precise about that detail, which one imagines is rather a long time if you are being stabbed. By the time he was restrained, the would-be assassin had seriously wounded Rushdie’s left hand, punctured his torso multiple times, slashed his neck, and stabbed him in the right eye deeply enough to destroy the optic nerve.

Rushdie refers to this horrific near-fatal assault on several occasions in Knife as a loss of ‘innocence’ – an odd characterisation coming from someone who had lived as the world’s most famous marked man for more than three decades. Given that the threat against his life has not disappeared, the word seems credible only if he means innocent in the sense of ‘naïve’. Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa calling for Rushdie’s murder, declared in February 1989, was reaffirmed as recently as 2017. There was still a multi-million-dollar bounty on Rushdie’s head, as he was no doubt aware. He had long anticipated the moment. As his attacker runs toward him, he thinks: ‘So it’s you. Here you are.’ Yet one can hardly blame him for entertaining the idea that, after all this time, things might have cooled down enough for him to lower his guard, if only a little. ‘Surely the world had moved on,’ he writes, ‘and that subject was closed.’

Knife is Rushdie’s record of the aftermath of the attack. The book follows the slow progress of his recovery, detailing with grim good humour all the painful medical indignities visited upon his gravely injured body, including the toe-curling experience of having his ruined eye sewn shut. It is also an uxorious tribute to his wife Eliza, who stays by his side throughout the whole ordeal. But its unavoidable subject is the meaning of the attack itself. Rushdie spends much of Knife willing himself to consign the whole wretched business to the past and to reclaim his life. He makes a show of disdain for his attacker, whom he refuses to name and openly scorns as an asinine loser. There is more than a touch of fuck-you-I’m-still-here about this book, and fair enough, though that in itself speaks of its defining paradox. If someone really means nothing to you, you don’t have to tell them.

The international uproar that followed the publication of Rushdie’s fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), is arguably the most extraordinary and far-reaching literary controversy in history, but is has always seemed like an easy one, ethically speaking. On one side, there was a work of fiction: a perfectly legitimate mode of expression, imaginative exploration, philosophical questioning, satire, and cultural criticism. On the other side was incitement to murder, which is the very definition of illegitimate speech.

Many struggled with this distinction at the time. Rushdie has certainly not forgotten (and why should he?) that there were quite a few authors – he names John Berger, Germaine Greer, and Roald Dahl, among others – who saw the indefensible fatwa as an occasion to chastise him for causing trouble. One might have expected pusillanimous responses from simpering politicians, who can always be counted on to call for religion to be respected whenever it reveals itself to be undeserving of respect. But it remains astonishing that there were writers, living representatives of the principle of freedom of conscience that was being unambiguously attacked – people whose job is to express the truth as they see it and who render themselves useless if they don’t – who came out in support of the weaselly proposition that novelists should avoid sensitive topics and watch what they say.

Admonishing voices were subdued in the wake of the gruesome attempt on Rushdie’s life. It is all fun and games until someone loses an eye, as Aunt Ethel used to say. One of the notable effects of the historical distance between the incident and the original controversy is to make it impossible to ignore the inherent absurdity of claiming to be violently enraged by a novel. That distance, as much as anything else, draws Rushdie back to the puzzle of his twenty-four-year-old assailant, who is currently awaiting trial for attempted murder. The fact that ‘A’ (as Rushdie refers to him) has decided to plead not guilty, even though the attack took place at a filmed event in front of an auditorium full of people and he was apprehended at the scene, suggests he is not much of a thinker. He claims to have read no more than two pages of the novel, published ten years before he was born, that has notionally motivated his attempt to stab a septuagenarian to death. His knowledge of Rushdie was mostly gleaned from YouTube videos, which led him to conclude that the author was ‘disingenuous’.

Rushdie latches on to this intriguing choice of word, because he recognises that to write fiction is indeed a way of being disingenuous. He reflects that, as a novelist, he has spent his life trading in imaginative fancies, finding great value and delight in them, despite being a rationalist and an atheist.

Religions are fictions too, of course – highly implausible fictions. Their way of being disingenuous is to pretend they are not fictional, claim for themselves the right to dictate terms, regulate conscience and behaviour, and place themselves above criticism. This is also their essential vulnerability and the underlying reason why contemptible theocrats like Khomeini – who was the embodiment of pretty much everything a decent person should be against – hate and fear literature. Works of unfettered imagination are proof that people can have minds of their own. The moment a religion is recognised as myth, a human invention, it becomes simply one story among many, open to competing interpretations and thus to criticism. It can no longer compel belief or demand obedience. The fraudulence of its special pleading becomes obvious and the nonsense concept of blasphemy evaporates.

The contrast, perhaps as much a matter of sensibility as of philosophy, is set out in the undesired ‘intimacy’ between Rushdie and his attacker. Despite his strong desire to move on with his life and leave the foolish young man to face the legal consequences of his actions, Rushdie fantasises about confronting him, interrogating him about his motives and beliefs. Knife eventually gives itself over to a series of imagined conversations between them. ‘I want to understand you,’ Rushdie writes.

This is where the novelist’s imagination fails him, albeit in an apposite way. Rushdie is genuine in his desire to give the man who tried to kill him the space to explain himself, but the figure who appears before him remains unforthcoming, obtuse, vaguely angry – in fictional terms an unconvincing character, lacking sufficient motivation and psychological complexity. Their dialogue never moves beyond the fundamental impasse between literature and religion, which is also to say irony and dogma. ‘Literalism is a mistake,’ says Rushdie. ‘The Word is the Word,’ his attacker replies.

Rushdie handles these themes lightly, less out of a sense of delicacy than from an understandable weariness. ‘Sometimes I think I belong to another age,’ he muses at one point. His arguments about the fundamental importance of freedom of expression have been worn smooth by repetition over the years, but they are presented in Knife with the unhappy knowledge that cultural attitudes have shifted in a more censorious direction over the past decade or so. No one knows better than Salman Rushdie what is at stake in such a shift. Near the beginning of Knife, he remarks that ‘whatever the attack was about, it wasn’t about The Satanic Verses’. It should be obvious enough by now that the fatwa never really was either. 

Thirty years before the Australian career criminal Gregory David Roberts travelled to Bombay and sought to make for himself, in the words of critic Peter Pierce, ‘a good Asian life’, another socially alienated Australian pursued such a life, in Indonesia, one which in its own way was as remarkable as that novelised by Roberts in Shantaram (2003).

Clive Williams went to Java in 1951, at the age of thirty, as a Jehovah’s Witness missionary. After three years of puritanical proselytising, with little success, he was ‘disfellowshipped’, a form of shunning and the strongest censure the JWs can impose on a member of their flock. Why? A number of possible reasons can be canvassed but one probably doesn’t need to look past Williams’s homosexuality.

Williams successfully sought help from his local parliamentary member, back in Geelong, to enable him to continue living in Indonesia. In agreeably unregulated medical environs, he set up a chiropody practice, in Semarang. He also began to teach English: almost inevitably, it seems, given the surging demand for this language.

I'm a whitefella who has never met Bruce Pascoe, but I’ve heard a lot about him. For the past few years, I have worked across Gippsland in the field of Aboriginal cultural heritage, and many of the people I meet mention his name. Experience has led me to try and dodge most of these conversations, knowing that our discussion will probably satisfy neither party, but I’m not having much luck. People want to talk about Pascoe, and often it is unpleasant. I have heard him described as a charlatan and worse, usually by those who have not met him, spoken with him, or read his work. Most of these critics are whitefellas, preoccupied with questioning or discrediting his Aboriginal heritage.

I find this preoccupation both odd and depressing. As with so much about Aboriginal culture and identity, some whitefellas want to frame the debate and force their say – Aboriginal matters decided on whitefella terms, as has been the case since colonisation. By contrast, the Aboriginal people I know have little interest in throwing barbs about Pascoe and his background. Rather, they want to speak about Country and how we might work together to heal the calamities that more than two centuries of colonial practice have inflicted on the landscape. To my mind, that tells us two things: that Aboriginal culture is inherently generous, and that Aboriginal people are often better at identifying the matters that warrant attention.

From across the ditch, New Zealand can look like a place where settlers and Indigenous people have forged a successful, postcolonial modus vivendi. The image conceals more than it reveals. As in Australia, relations between Indigenous people and the state are fraught. At the November 2023 election, right-wing minority parties won electoral support by rejecting what they have characterised as special privileges to Māori. And a long-standing, bipartisan consensus on ‘biculturalism’ is breaking down.

At this year’s Waitangi Day celebrations, held annually to mark the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi between Māori rangatira (leaders) and the British Crown in 1840, the leaders of the new right-wing coalition government, led by Christopher Luxon, were drowned out when they spoke on the Treaty grounds in the Bay of Islands. Forceful challenges were issued by Māori leaders about the coalition’s policies regarding the Treaty, a proposed referendum on the Treaty’s principles, and the matter of co-governance. Protests and ongoing debate in mainstream and social media underline hard feelings about the issues at stake for a range of New Zealanders.

What is this all about? Many Māori are protesting a rolling back of policies undertaken by Jacinda Ardern’s Labour government. Those included a deepening of biculturalism through an expansion of the use of the Māori language in the public service and the design of a new compulsory history curriculum for schools that focuses on Māori history and colonisation. The Ardern government also pursued what were called ‘co-governance’ initiatives. In 2022, Labour created a separate, national Māori health authority. Perhaps most controversial was the ‘Three Waters’ policy to centralise ailing water infrastructure. Currently managed by local councils, the government designed regional advisory groups that would be established according to a fifty-fifty split in representation between local councils and mana whenua (local Indigenous authorities). Around seventeen per cent of New Zealanders identify as having some Māori ancestry, and a growing number of these identify with at least one iwi (tribe), though a smaller proportion of Māori are formal tribal members.

‘Everyone allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female.’ So said Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey. Even allowing for Regency hyperbole, there is some truth in the sally. We think of the inimitable letters of Emily Dickinson, who once wrote to a succinct correspondent: ‘It were dearer had you protracted it, but the Sparrow must not propound his crumb.’ In 2001, Gregory Kratzmann edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected Letters of Gwen Harwood, 1943-1995. Anyone who ever received a letter or postcard from Harwood – surely our finest letter writer – knows what an event that was. She was nonpareil: witty, astringent, frank, irrepressible. Now we have this welcome collection of letters written by Elizabeth Harrower and Shirley Hazzard (unalphabetised on the cover, in a possible concession to the expatriate Hazzard’s international fame).

Hazzard and Harrower is unusual in a few respects, not just because of its span – from 1966, when ‘Shirley H-S.’ wrote to ‘Elizabeth (if I may call you that??)’, to Christmas 2008, when ‘E’ sent ‘S’ ‘This card – a light in the darkness’, shortly before dementia eclipsed Hazzard. Few published literary correspondences last so long or tell so much – lightly, warmly, absorbingly.

In late 1999, NASA announced that its Mars Climate Orbiter, a multi-million-dollar robot probe designed to study the weather and climate of Mars, was lost somewhere in space. The craft had failed to manoeuvre into its optimal orbit, ending either on a course towards the sun or in a fatal collision with the red planet. Investigations uncovered the source of the blunder: one team working on the orbiter had been using metric measurements, another team had been using imperial.

A similar sense of miscalculation hangs over Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Astronauts, a collection of five stories told from the perspective of a variety of objects that have, since the earliest days of the space race, been launched by humans towards the moon and beyond.

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), the sailor Charles Marlow recalls captaining a river steamer in the Belgian Congo, a venture that becomes a search for the colonial agent Kurtz, said to be a brilliant if infamous ivory trader, who is ill and possibly mad. Marlow’s journey, of course, becomes a passage into psychological as well as (to the European mind) geographical darkness, and offers a damning portrait of Western imperialism.

The title story of The Gorgon Flower, John Richards’s inspired début short story collection, follows a similar trajectory to Conrad’s canonical, but problematic, novella. Conveyed almost entirely through journal entries, it emulates the diaries of colonial explorers, and tells of (the fictional) Lord Tobias Edmundson’s 1861 journey up river and his trudge through dense jungle in Borneo in search of the eponymous flower. Thirty years earlier, Tobias’s botanist father was the first European to find the Gorgon flower, an elusive plant notable for its great size and striking appearance but also for its carnivorous appetite and hypnotic hold over nearby creatures – a grip that, to us as readers, seems to include its human attendees (think of the gorgons of Greek myth). Edmundson Sr had brought a specimen back to England, feeding it creatures living and dead. But both father and flower were lost when a fire swept through the father’s conservatory. The rediscovery and mapping of the plant by an English explorer in 1860 sets Tobias, also a botanist, on his journey.

One of Caledonian Road’s primary characters, Milo Mangasha, tends to speak in political slogans, which his childhood friend identifies as ‘college talk’. Readers may recognise in Milo the rhetoric of characters in Andrew O’Hagan’s previous novel, Mayflies (2020), a popular and critical success that was subsequently adapted for television. Like Mayflies, Caledonian Road is stridently certain about its political and moral positions. It reads like a passionate argument for purification. In this fictional world, set in contemporary Britain, a person who maintains ties with corrupt and wealthy conservatives, while voicing left-wing principles and ideals, risks a ‘crack-up’. Failing the test of moral consistency turns you into a cipher, a hollow man, a danger to yourself and others.

This is the position that Campbell Flynn – an art historian and public intellectual with a working-class background – finds himself in. Campbell enjoys modest fame among young people due to ‘a BBC podcast that often went viral’ but is constantly worried ‘about money and his failure to be as well-off as he should be’.

A mid-career genre change is always cause for attention. Best known for her fearless investigations into institutional sexual abuse, it is hardly surprising that Louise Milligan should transfer her journalistic nous and commitment to social justice into the realm of crime fiction. Pheasants Nest is part of a movement in post-#MeToo crime fiction, which has flourished in Australia and abroad in the past decade. It challenges the norms of the genre to centre victims and amplify the reverberations of violence against women (recent examples include Jessica Knoll’s Bright Young Women and Jacqueline Bublitz’s Before You Knew My Name).

What sets Milligan’s fiction début apart is her willingness to draw explicitly on her personal and professional background. Kate Delaney is the ‘right’ sort of victim – ‘middle-class, pretty, educated’ – and she knows it, having covered cases of victimised women in her work as an award-winning journalist. For a reader versed in Australian crimes of the past few decades, there is satisfaction in finding real-life parallels to the cases in Pheasants Nest. A clear inspiration for Kate’s violation and abduction is the 2012 murder of Jill Meagher, an Irish national and ABC worker who was intercepted while walking home from a night out in Melbourne’s inner-north, and whose partner, like Kate’s, was an initial suspect (Milligan even interviewed Tom Meagher at the time). A murder that Kate reports on, which occurs in an isolated locale renowned for its shallow gene pool and haunted colonial jail, has echoes of the Janelle Patton case. Pheasants Nest is titled after and partly takes place around an actual bridge in New South Wales, which Kate associates with suicides and the real-life, tragic deaths of two teenagers in 1989.

You need to look closely at the cover of Shankari Chandran’s novel Safe Haven to notice the sharp edges of the deceptively inviting image it depicts: the handcuffs, the barbed wire, the boat that seems to sit on top of the waves and yet be at the bottom of the sea, and the rebuke contained in the book’s title.

Chandran’s sprawling follow-up to her Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens (2022) is oceanic in subject and scope. In part, Chandran uses fiction to make geopolitical and social commentary: Safe Haven is a furious statement about the Sri Lankan civil war, Australia’s listless engagement with the treatment of the Tamil people, and Australia’s policies towards, and treatment of, asylum seekers, including its use of private offshore-detention facilities. But the novel is also a political thriller, complete with interagency tensions, cool technology, intricate and unlikely plans, much intrigue, and a shout-out to John le Carré. It is also a character study that dwells upon the many possible meanings of friendship and familial and romantic love. And it is a meditation on faith and religion, trauma and death, courage and guilt, curry pies, and much more. There are flashes of humour, too, though these are less prominent than in Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens.

One of the joys of reading – and a point of difference from narratives told on the various screens we turn to for leisure – is imagining a story’s mise en scène. Our mental pictures (termed phantasia by a group of British neurologists) are a strange alchemy of images from our memories, thoughts, and dreams. Though visualisation is not a universal experience, many readers may comment that a book-to-film adaptation was ‘exactly as I pictured it’ or else ‘nothing like what I saw in my mind’s eye’.

Bright Objects, the début novel of Melbourne-based writer Ruby Todd, excels in evoking the imagination. Todd achieves this not through the quantity or level of detail of her descriptions but through their quality. Her astute observations range from the pitch of a character’s voice to the font of a poster, and her imagery is fresh and richly hued: distance between characters is ‘like skin kept clean around a wound’, while the habitual counting of cars is ‘a rosary to measure time as it disappeared’. That this is Todd’s first book bodes well for Australian literature.

Autofiction differs from autobiography in that, to use Jean Genet’s formula with which Édouard Louis opens his latest novel, Change: A novel, the self is nothing but a ‘pretext’. In Louis’ case, it is a pretext for exploring the self as a sociological, rather than psychological, phenomenon; the enduring product of the social class in which it was forged. Change (first published in 2021 as Changer: méthode) opens with the narrator, Édouard (né Eddy), sitting at his desk writing what will become the novel we are now reading. His objective: ‘to fix the past in writing and, I suppose, to get rid of it’. This will prove easier said than done. As Édouard later discovers, the past has a way of reinstating itself, like a pendulum which is always restored to equilibrium. It is, however, less this resting place than the oscillations that Louis is interested in recording.

Louis’ childhood is a common theme in his work, in particular the poverty, violence, bullying, and homophobia he was subjected to growing up in the working-class village of Hallencourt in northern France. His novels all deal in one way or another with class, sexuality, transformation, and the intersection of life and fiction. Change, Louis’ fifth novel, tells the story of Édouard’s ‘escape’ from the village to a lycée in Amiens, the closest city, where he quickly sets about transforming himself to blend in with the new class of leftist élites to which he so desperately aspires.

It is only a coincidence that my book Frank Moorhouse: Strange paths, the first in a two-volume cultural biography of the Australian author, ends in 1974 – the same year that Copyright Agency was incorporated – and that it was published in time to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of this incorporation. As Moorhouse himself always argued, such coincidences, chance happenings, and historical accidents are often far more important in shaping our culture than we like to concede.

One limitation of conventional biography is that focusing on an individual life tends to push other individuals who shared that life into peripheral or supporting roles. One of the (many) reasons I was drawn to Moorhouse as a biographical subject, however, was because he self-consciously rejected this individualist conceit. He always considered himself a detached observer, and ironic participant, in events, always working alongside other people. His fascination with committees, meetings, and institutions as ways of organising social experience – of harnessing coincidence, chance, and the accidental – informed his thinking and his writing.

Nowhere is this individualist conceit more clearly demonstrated than in the public’s view of Moorhouse’s involvement in the landmark copyright case in the early 1970s. It is usually referred to as ‘The Moorhouse Case’ or ‘Moorhouse vs UNSW’. This elides the involvement of Moorhouse’s publisher, Richard Walsh, and Angus & Robertson, who were co-plaintiffs. In fact, the case appearing before the Supreme Court of New South Wales in April and May 1974 was Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty Ltd v University of New South Wales. Moorhouse’s publisher shared the risk of paying costs if they lost the case, while Moorhouse’s personal indemnity was guaranteed by the Australian Society of Authors (ASA).

Studies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

As Osborne writes in her introduction, the book’s ‘primary focus is on the cultural history of Adelaide’s networks of artists, galleries and societies’, and on their role in relation to the ‘fostering, the development and public appreciation of modern art’. Proceeding through a chronological investigation, Osborne provides overviews for each of the six decades covered, and has marshalled sixteen further contributors, whose case studies allow the book to zoom in and out from the general to the highly specific; chapters range in their focus from migrant artists in the postwar period, to the impact of the Adelaide Central School of Art in the 1980s, to Osborne’s own fascinating work on South Australian photography in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

Neil Armfield (Adelaide Festival)Neil Armfield is an Australian director of theatre, film, and opera.  He has directed for all of Australia’s state theatre companies, Opera Australia, The Welsh National Opera, The Bregenz Festival in Austria, Zurich Opera, Canadian Opera, Houston Grand Opera, English National Opera, The Lyric Opera in Chicago, and the Royal Opera House, London. He was co-founder of Sydney’s Belvoir Theatre and was its Artistic Director for seventeen years. He was joint Artistic Director of the Adelaide Festival with Rachel Healy from 2017 to 2023.

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

In 1970, when I was fourteen, the RSC toured Australia with two ravishing productions: John Barton’s Twelfth Night and Trevor Nunn’s The Winter’s Tale, with a company that included Donald Sinden as Malvolio, and Judi Dench as Viola/Hermione/Perdita. (It was one of the last performances in Sydney’s magnificent old Theatre Royal, destroyed the following year to make way for the MLC building.)

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

In 1972, aged seventeen, I directed my first production: Toad of Toad Hall at Homebush Boys’ High. The great Indigenous director Brian Syron was judging all school theatre productions in participating high schools across New South Wales. He met me in a classroom after the show and asked me if I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I said I thought I’d become a teacher. He said, ‘Because if you want to be a director, you know what you’re doing.’ That was all I needed.

I have not told anyone that there is a small child growing in my bedside table drawer. The Ziplock bag containing E’s hair, a mass of tangled brown. A handful of baby teeth.

I had brought E into Emergency with shooting pains down his legs. His gait wobbly. One leg doing a strange kick with each step. A fever. They thought it could be meningitis and performed an MRI. At 2 am they came back to tell me the MRI showed normal activity in the brain. It was clear. It was good news. At 2.03 am they came back and said, ‘Could we have a word outside?’ We moved into the hallway, under the fluorescent lights, surrounded by other people’s tragedies.

‘When they were looking at the MRI of the brain, they found something else. Lower down. In his chest. Here,’ the Emergency doctor said, pointing to a blur. ‘A mass.’

‘Are you saying that’s ...?’ Maybe if she doesn’t say the word and I don’t say the word it won’t be true.

Before either of us can say anything, there is a loud thump. More, a thud. More, a crack. And a scream. E is screaming. He has fallen from the hospital bed. A thump. A thud. A crack, face down onto the hospital’s linoleum floor. Everyone rushes to lift him as he continues to scream. His body is a stiff plank, for reasons that aren’t yet clear but will become clear soon. They put him in a neck brace. They roll him gently. I hover, trying to be useful but feel like I am just getting in the way. They manoeuvre him back onto the bed, and a nurse with a tight blonde ponytail clicks the bed railing. Click.

Netflicks is the first book in UWAP’s ‘Vignettes’ series. The series’ brief is to introduce readers to contemporary scholarly thinking about pressing issues of modern life in the format of short, lucid books. Judging from the first iteration, ‘Vignettes’ promises to offer complex and coherent readings of the world we live in now, informed by deep knowledge but wearing its learning lightly. Netflicks is written in accessible prose that invites the reader into the scholarly analysis of television, should they be new to it, with clear and uncomplicated language. When technical concepts are introduced, the author makes sure to provide a definition and to justify his deployment of what might seem to be jargon.

As an academic myself, I might not be considered the best person to judge whether Netflicks succeeds in offering an accessible rendition of scholarly ideas. I am happy to report, however, that I conducted an unscientific investigation and read out paragraphs of the book to non-academic friends and family. I asked them merely whether they could follow the ideas and understand the prose in the short sections they heard (selected randomly). My listeners affirmed that my hunch was correct: that Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s prose was cogent and engaging to the general reader.

We Are Free to Change the World, an intellectual biography of Hannah Arendt, is Lesley Stonebridge’s seventh book, and is informed by the author’s expertise in twentieth-century literature, history, law, and political theory. Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham, and a regular contributor to the New Statesman. A successful scholar, she is also used to communicating to audiences beyond the academy.

Rowan Williams employs the label ‘intellectual biography’ on the book’s back cover, but I admit that I am not entirely comfortable with the categorisation. Intellectual biography is most often employed as a subtitle, self-selected by author or publisher, as in, for example, Giovanni Fresu’s recent Antonio Gramsci: An intellectual biography (Palgrave, 2023), which the publisher describes as ‘a comprehensive overview of the process of development of Gramsci’s philosophical-political thought’. Broadly speaking, an intellectual biography emphasises the way the subject’s lived experience has informed and shaped their thinking over time. Stonebridge’s book on Arendt does operate as intellectual biography in this way, but it is also doing something more.

Kevin Hart’s Dark-Land is the memoir of a distinguished poet and scholar who was born in England in 1954, moved with his family to Queensland when he was eleven, and migrated again in 2002 to the United States, where he is currently Professor of Christian Studies at the University of Virginia. Dark-Land is well-written and amusing, with memorable vignettes ranging from his time in a London primary school to his bonding as an Australian teenager with his cat Sooty. On a wider spectrum, though, Dark-Land addresses more weighty concerns around time, memory, and intellectual or religious illumination. He recalls as a child listening to a BBC performance of the allegorical journey invoked in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and he describes himself now as ‘still clambering up the hill I had known since childhood in London’. The title of his memoir signals this putative passage from darkness into light.

The dark land described in the first half of the book encompasses ‘the entire grimy part of London in which we lived’, the outer London suburb of Barking where he attended primary school in the early 1960s, when the area was still recovering from World War II. As someone whose childhood was spent just a few miles to the east, in the Essex suburb of Brentwood, I found the anecdotes in these sections to be evocative and perceptive: rivalries between West Ham and Tottenham football supporters, the Green Line buses that took apparently mysterious routes into rural areas, and so on. But I also thought Hart’s reminiscences to be at times oddly condescending in tone, especially in their attempts to imitate cockney patois: ‘Blimey, look at ’im, ’e’s all ’oly now.’ As Gavin Jones suggested in his critical work Speech Acts, literary representations of local dialects as ‘inferior’ to standard English have tended to reinforce conventional notions of what is proper and what isn’t. But such linguistic stereotyping accords with Hart’s general representation of East London as dark and degraded, an unredeemed world.

Werner Herzog is perhaps the only cinéaste from the epoch sometimes referred to as the ‘golden age of art cinema’ whose reputation as a pop cultural figure eclipses that of his films. One of the key members of the New German Cinema movement, and the director of celebrated feature films such as Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Herzog has come to be known among internet users for his drawling Bavarian accent and his existential musings about solitude, despair, and the brutality of nature. However, as Herzog’s new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All (translated by Michael Hofmann) reveals, behind this ironically morose façade lies a sentimental and deeply thoughtful man who is endlessly fascinated by the human soul and the superhuman drive to transcend what we thought possible.

This fixation with the extraordinary, the unthinkable, can be found everywhere in Herzog’s films. In 1973, he shot The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner, a documentary which follows Walter Steiner’s attempt to break the world record for ski jumping. As recounted in Every Man for Himself and God Against All, what captivates Herzog about Steiner is not simply that Steiner succeeded in bettering the record by almost ten metres, but that, in the process of doing so, ‘several times he almost flew to his death because the ramp was not built for a flyer like him’. Captured in slow motion by Herzog’s telephoto lens, Steiner glides gracefully like an animal whose natural habitat is the sky, disregarding his own mortality in pursuit of humankind’s most ancient dream. Above all, it is this blind ambition, this temptation to fly too close to the sun, notwithstanding the consequences, which preoccupies Herzog as a filmmaker.

The Relationship Is the Project is a guidebook to working with communities. The work explicitly asks the reader to consider not only how art is created but from where that art comes – and it so often comes from community.

Originally conceived by Jade Lillie, this work came together through a multi-year collaboration with Kate Larsen, Cara Kirkwood, and Jax Brown. The overall process is a demonstration of the ethos espoused in the work – relationships matter. Each of the four editors brought a different perspective and experience, making this collection an iterative collaboration coming closer to representing what communities within the arts and cultural sector have expressed a desire for.

This book is an unusual work, demanding to be reviewed for its content as well as for its stated purpose. To consider only one would be to misunderstand the work, which articulates not only that relationships matter, but also that context and positionality and perspective always matter.

Jane Hirshfield writes a poem on the first day of each year. ‘Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me’ is one of the new poems in The Asking, along with poems selected from nine collections published since 1982. It begins with a question the world asks (‘as it asks daily’): ‘And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?’

Outside the window is a mountain: ‘For years, I woke each day first to the mountain, / then to the question.’ Counting things the speaker can make or change – ‘black-eyed peas and collards’, a pudding made from late-season persimmons, a light bulb – she observes the way the world brings sorrow after sorrow. Some are immovable as a mountain; others change, as questions do. ‘The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old, / and still they surprised.’ To these she brings postcards and stamps, daily trying to respond.

Among the poem’s long lines is a couplet built of spare, clipped sentences. Stone, Hirshfield writes ‘did not become apple. War did not become peace.’ How then, asks this poem, like many by Hirshfield, do we continue to face the world’s pain?

Identity is a hard thing to define. What makes us who we are? We have social identities, shaped by our affinities and proximities to social groups, cultural identities informed by values, languages, rituals, traditions, and a whole multitude of different phenomena that combine to make us who we are.

In Roslyn Orlando’s literary début, Ekhō, identity is linked to voice and agency; I am who I am because of what I say and my ability to say it. In Audrey Molloy’s second collection of poetry, The Blue Cocktail, identity is linked to place; I am who I am because of the places I inhabit. Both books have more complex theses and focuses than can be summed up in a few snappy opening paragraphs. For example, Orlando condemns technology as a simple echo of knowledge, and Molloy raises questions of belonging. Identity links these two works and provides a key to understanding their intricacies.

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerated will be less severe than a fire in an intact forest.’ Many years of research followed this heckle. The result? A counter-intuitive finding that fire severity increases in logged forests.

This anecdote, recounted in Lindenmayer’s latest book, goes to the heart of his character: a philomath inspired to ask questions; a tireless ecologist who has explored and worked in the same forests for more than forty years. But there is a second Lindenmayer, a more recent creation: an accidental celebrity who has become increasingly outspoken as his detractors have escalated their attacks. It would, as he once said in an interview for the Wonderground journal, be morally irresponsible if he did not communicate what he has learned.

For those researching Lindenmayer online, it can be hard to sift through the rubble of brickbats and sensational headlines and find the scientific work that makes Lindenmayer one of the world’s most oft-cited scientists. For this reason, The Forest Wars is a necessary compendium, a summation of four decades’ worth of research against the backdrop of a rapidly changing industry. Indeed, the timing of this book could not be more opportune. Shortly after Lindenmayer finished the first draft, the Victorian government announced that the cessation of native logging was to be brought forward from 2030 to 2024.

The ‘Bastard of Bingil Bay’ features on no banknote or coin, nor is he listed in any roll-call of ‘important Australians’, and yet, if it were not for John Büsst, it is likely that twenty-odd national parks and rainforest reserves on the far north-east coast of Queensland would not be so designated and might in fact have been obliterated. It is also probable that, without Büsst, today’s fight for the Great Barrier Reef would have already been lost, the vast ecosystem fragmented into a slew of cement quarries and cheap limestone pits. Considering the extent to which this vast coral labyrinth has shaped the identity of modern Australia, the relative absence of Büsst’s influence from the historical record is doubtless representative of the many such travesties historians seek to rectify.

It could be said that correcting such omissions is simply part of the job for historians – but for Iain McCalman, one of Australia’s most public-spirited and accomplished humanities scholars, the absence of John Büsst from the pages of Australian history made him uneasy. McCalman, author of The Reef: A passionate history (2013), a fascinating history of the Great Barrier Reef told in twelve tales, had featured Büsst as an important figure alongside Judith Wright and forest ecologist Len Webb in the exhaustive campaign to protect the Reef from being drilled for oil, dredged for fertiliser, and quarried for cement in the 1960s and early 1970s. McCalman named them ‘the poet, the painter and the forester’, and deftly portrayed their friendship as a kind of enlightenment in which the arts and sciences came together, sparking the social movement that led to the Great Barrier Reef marine park. But had he, McCalman worried, emphasised the painter’s role in what was effectively the initiation of environmental policy in this country? Had he conveyed the significance of this incisive, energetic man? After all, hadn’t Wright herself said that Büsst had masterminded the campaign? After one tactical victory, Wright wrote to him: ‘Good on you, mate!’ – adding that their success was ‘All because of YOU.’

Iain McCalman (Lachlan McCalman/UNSW Press)Iain McCalman was born in Nyasaland in 1947, and educated in Zimbabwe and Australia. He writes British, European, and Australian histories of popular science, politics, conservation, and literary cultures. His books include The Reef: A passionate history (2013) and Delia Akeley and the Monkey (2022). His new book is John Büsst: Bohemian artist and saviour of reef and rainforest (NewSouth, 2024). He is a former President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and was Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Sydney [University] Environment Institute (2011-21). He was awarded Officer of the Order of Australia in 2007 for ‘services to history and the humanities’.

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

I would dash with my partner, Kate Fullagar, to Sorrento on the Amalfi Coast to repeat a sublime holiday of twenty years ago, drinking Campania wine and eating Caprese salad.

Decolonising has reached the classics. Complexity, diversity, and entanglement are in. Greece and Rome are, well, out. The movement to ‘reclaim’ Antiquity began with noble aims: to emancipate the ancients from the prism of politics and war through which we like to see them, to emphasise the role of technology and trade in their lives, and to make women and people of colour visible among them again. Alas, decolonisation all too often seems to have descended into ugly arguments over restitution of artefacts (Elgin marbles, anyone?) or the skin shade of this or that Roman notable (Septimius Severus or St Hadrian of Canterbury, for example). Books such as Josephine Quinn’s are the sensible, balancing side of the equation, an antidote to so much virtue signalling and grievance mongering. Quinn’s is an ancient world decentred – provincialised, to invoke Dipesh Chakrabarty’s celebrated term. Greece and Rome remain, but must jostle with others for attention, space, and significance. The argument is simple. Antiquity was far more multipolar, dynamic, and integrated in reality than in the civilisational – and, indeed, civilising – narratives that Europeans since Petrarch have been telling themselves about it.

Quinn’s basic conceit is that the reader is best guided through ancient complexity by place. Thus, each chapter opens with a setting: Amarna 1350 bce, Susa 324 bce, ‘between Poitiers and Tours 732’. The aim is laudable, and perhaps a nod to the success of her Worcester College colleague Peter Frankopan, whose well-received The Silk Roads: A new history of the world (2015) travels twenty-five ‘silk roads’. Through her settings, Quinn hopes, like Frankopan, to craft a series of vignettes that reveal connected histories. The effect could be said to wear off somewhat after thirty chapters, for the book does become something of a whistlestop tour through ancient sites, major and minor. But perhaps such fatigue is unavoidable once you withdraw Greco-Roman primacy and are forced to engage pre-modern totality. Quinn starts early (c.2000 bce) and finishes late (Christopher Columbus), which at least leaves plenty of scope to present unknown examples and original insights.