ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

On 15 August, Advances and about one hundred lovers of short fiction descended on Gleebooks in Sydney for the announcement of the winner of the 2024 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Not since January 2020 had ABR presented a prize ceremony in public. Since then, because of the exigencies of Covid-19 and pesky lockdowns, all our celebrations have happened online, and goodness knows the popularity of online events of this kind has begun to wane,  like those Zoom soirées and cocktail parties we endured.

George Orwell’s Elephant

Dear Editor,

I am grateful to Theodore Ell for alerting readers to two factual errors in the essay ‘George Orwell’s Elephant’ in the book of the same name that he reviewed (ABR, August 2024). I regret the errors and my failure to correct them. The editorial team at Gazebo Books and I worked closely together on the manuscript, and to blame solely the editorial team for errors would be unjust and ungracious. I am the author and I take full responsibility.

I sincerely hope that the readers aren’t put off by the errors and can still enjoy what the book has to offer. Gazebo Books is in the process of correcting the eBook version, and the manuscript is also being edited for its possible second print.

Subhash Jaireth

I did know my father

Dear Editor,

Difficult as it is for some historians to separate the present from the past in their thinking, that skill is central to their profession. The other is to write with due respect to the likely audience. Joan Beaumont seems to have set aside these two essentials in her article ‘“I never knew my uncle”: The Phenomenon of Pilgrimages and Postmemory’ (ABR, July 2024).

I did know my father – for almost half a century. Not yet born, I was lucky that he survived internment, massacres, and the atrocities visited upon Gull Force 2/21st Battalion on Ambon during World War II. The horrifying statistics that Beaumont relates in her ‘Commentary’ are accurate, but her words do nothing to convey the human reality of those who were there. Nor do they offer a pathway to remembering.

My father, along with six other captives, escaped from the POW camp on Tan Tui early during the internment. His personal anguish in agreeing to attempt escape was because he was leaving mates behind, one from his own hometown, who later perished. The seven men reached Darwin on cobbled-together boats, surviving on bananas and fish. They were the first to notify the authorities of the Ambon situation.

I came to know these men over the years. I have also interviewed another man who was interned for the duration. All returned to live full lives and had families. Mine was taught to abhor war – yes, to remember, but not to idolise, and later to recognise that Japanese people are, of course, not all war criminals.

A terrible aspect of this mission was the fact that Australian military commanders in Melbourne knew they were sending these young men from Darwin into a foray with Singapore gone and the Japanese navy already heading south to Indonesia. Beaumont presents this as a ‘sacrifice of the soldiers themselves’, not of military failure. Not true. She has failed to capture the past, failed to understand that observing places and memorials does not necessarily respect emotions that are still alive in many families touched by war.

No doubt those on the ‘pilgrimage’ who had direct family connections with the past were deeply moved throughout the journey, but, as an observer, Beaumont’s tourist-like remarks verge on the offensive, to both local Indonesians and to those who fought on these sites. ‘Ambon is not easy to get to,’ she says. ‘We stopped at a tired resort for lunch and a swim’, she comments and the bar ‘sometimes struggled to provide enough cold beer’.

I have been an Australian publisher for decades, and a doctoral historian who has researched the history of the people of Gull Force and the people of Ambon. It seems to me that an attempt to apply a newly minted academic label ‘postmemory’, by way of explanation of current generational feelings, is far short of the truth. Joan Beaumont may be researching for a revised chapter of her 1988 book, but please, can it not yet consign living memory to cemeteries and academic terminology?

Sandra McComb

Sybaritic lefties

Dear Editor,

Further to Marilyn Lake’s review of Andrew Fowler’s book Nuked: The submarine fiasco that sank Australian sovereignty (ABR, August 2024), it is a matter of considerable shame that the substantive opposition to the nuclear subs proposal has taken the form of letters to the editor by Paul Keating in the Australian Financial Review. Too many on the left have had their passion diminished by the pleasures and indulgences of middle-class affluence.

Patrick Hockey

Gatekeepers

Dear Editor,

What a great and needed article Robyn Arianrhod has written (‘Beyond the Mundane: Popular Science Writing in Our Literary Landscape, ABR, August 2024). The gatekeepers have always underestimated the breadth of Australian readers’ interests, intellectual capacity, curiosity, and willingness to delve into unfamiliar territory. I fear this condescension is getting worse, with so much economic anxiety in the publishing sector.

J.M. Green

Bill Hayden, the first Queensland policeman to lead  a federal political party, wrote of his experiences as  a constable – the violence, the squalor, the tragedy – in his autobiography, Hayden (Angus & Robertson, 1996), and concluded: ‘All of these led me to feel a great anger at the injustices some people had to bear.’ At one point, the former governor-general noted that his ‘humanist’ reaction to injustice reflected his background as the son of a father who was an illegal immigrant and a mother who suffered domestic abuse.

By comparison, Peter Dutton, the second Queensland copper to lead a federal political party, had a sheltered upbringing. Perhaps that’s why, in his 2002 maiden speech, his anger was directed more at individual than systemic failings:

I have seen the best and the worst that society has to offer. I have seen the wonderful, kind nature of people willing to offer any assistance to those in their worst hour, and I have seen the sickening behaviour displayed by people who, frankly, barely justify their existence in our sometimes over-tolerant society.

Judging by Dutton’s 2023 appearance with journalist Annabel Crabb on ABC TV’s political-cooking show, Kitchen Cabinet, this Manichaean mentality still influences his approach to politics.

CRABB: I’ve read something that [your wife] Kirilly said – I’ve always remembered it – that you’re a very black-and-white person, that’s there’s no shades of grey. So, you make your mind up about something super-fast and then you just proceed on that basis. Is that what that means?

DUTTON: Yeah. I’m pretty sure that’s what she would have meant by it, which I think is a bit of a police trait, and it’s dealing with the problem that’s before you and then moving on to the next one and trying to deal with it efficiently, I suppose.

CRABB: Is black-and-white a help in politics? To have really clear views?

DUTTON: I always think the job of prime minister – you know, having worked closely and watched a few others fairly closely – I think you’ve got about twenty issues of the day, so twenty balls in the air, and I think the people who know what they believe in, I think they can land eighteen of those balls pretty early and then they sweat the two which are really tough issues. The ones that aren’t good and don’t have a clear sense of who they are or want to say something that they know people will want to hear or – that sort of approach – I think by Tuesday they’ve got forty balls in the air, and I think it becomes overwhelming.

It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.

Just as this use of the term ‘larrikin’ is thoroughly denuded of its original menace, so too is this mythical Hawke. In the 1870s, when the term first emerged, a larrikin was an itinerant and belligerent city thug, a young man who would hang about in pushes (i.e. gangs), abusing people on the streets, leering at women, getting drunk, and brawling with volleys of Irish confetti (i.e. bricks).

It was no surprise, in the end, when the October 2023 referendum on the constitutional enshrinement of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was comprehensively defeated, given the concerted opposition of the Liberal-National Coalition. The history of Australian referendums is clear: bipartisan support is a necessary precondition for constitutional change.

While a great many of those on the political right were  adamantly opposed to the Voice, a small number of constitutional conservatives attempted to persuade their political brethren of the benefits of change. These included Greg Craven, former vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University, and Julian Leeser, former shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians, until he resigned from the shadow Cabinet to campaign for the Voice.

Closely aligned with Craven and Leeser were Jesuit priest Frank Brennan and academic Damien Freeman. Both have now published sorrowful assessments of the referendum. However, each account is diminished by its author’s unwillingness to entertain the notion that conservative politicians continue to engage in Indigenous affairs in bad faith.

In times of war

At high tide there’s a breakaway from pounding surf.
Some of the ocean has tired of the incessant battering
and steals over the beach away from the refractory swell.

As its title tells us, this book focuses on one month of World War II: November 1942. Swedish author and historian Peter Englund argues that this month was the turning point of the war. In North Africa, the Germans were on the retreat after the Allied victory at El Alamein. American forces began their land operations against the Axis powers by invading French Morocco and Algeria. In the Pacific war, the battle of Guadalcanal reached its decisive climax, while Australian troops recaptured Kokoda after pushing the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track. Most importantly, on the Eastern front, the Red Army launched an attack that surrounded the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. Two months later, the 91,000 German troops still alive in the ruins of the city surrendered. Almost all of them perished in captivity.

Hence, to quote Englund, at the start of November ‘people still believed that the Axis powers would be victorious. By the end of that month it had become clear that it was only a matter of time before they would lose.’ Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously stated that Alamein was ‘perhaps, the end of the beginning’.

This is a massive book: 506 pages of text; eighty-nine pages of references and bibliography; seventeen maps, all of them full page or more; and forty-two illustrations. It is also an important book, and it is easy for the reader to follow Nick Lloyd’s argument. The Eastern Front is a major corrective to how most readers here and in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States understand the Great War, as it was once called.

I have been studying and thinking about World War I, professionally, since I started my doctoral studies in 1972. I have never given much attention to the Eastern Front, barely understanding the war that involved the Russian Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and millions of soldiers. The war raged all over eastern Europe, Italy, and the Balkans, across nations, in a conflict that involved the massive movement of huge numbers of soldiers that is unimaginable to those who know the story of fighting on the much more static Western Front.

Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity. Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.

An experienced arts journalist (and poet) who contributes mainly to the London-based Financial Times, Spence’s idea for this book arose early in her career, in 2006, when she attended the glitzy launch of luxury goods magnate Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum on Venice’s Grand Canal. Here, Spence came face to face with the troubling contradictions of the art world, which she dubs ‘Planet Art’. On display was one of American artist Barbara Kruger’s best-known works, an image of a hand holding a sign stating: I shop therefore I am. ‘By displaying Kruger’s work here in his sumptuous new Venetian palace, M. Pinault is sticking two fingers up at her values,’ Spence writes. ‘You shop, he is saying, therefore I am. I can buy you and your precious leftie idealism. I can reduce your art to an ironic, hollow yelp of despair.’

Australia is experiencing a housing disaster that risks turning into a social and economic catastrophe. It is a disaster because all four aspects of the system are extremely stressed and play havoc with the lives and aspirations of millions of people. Home ownership is beyond the reach of many households, even those with two good wages coming in, let alone those with one. Rents have skyrocketed and few affordable rentals are available for ordinary working families. Housing costs are so high as to lower living standards generally. The modern history of social housing is one of deliberate government under-investment, to the point where it is available only to those on income support and with desperate needs. In our land of plenty, homelessness is among the highest in the world and visible to all – a fact reported to our national shame in the international media.

This situation has been chronic and worsening for more than a generation. Without a different approach it will go on for at least another. The Australian housing disaster appears to be maturing into a new normal, which really would be a catastrophe.

This is no spider that has crept up on unsuspecting Australia in the dark. The housing disaster has happened in broad daylight, and it continues to do so predictably and avoidably under our moral watch. Writers such as Jim Kemeny and Peter Mares, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur Miloon Kathari, have sounded strong alarms along the way, complemented recently by the likes of Alan Kohler, Saul Eslake, Jessie Hohmann, and Chris Martin. Speaking as housing historians, finance journalists, taxation economists, and human rights experts, they give voice to a powerful message: the current design of the housing and taxation system puts profit before people and is not fit for its fundamental social purposes.

Leslie Jamison never smooths over the thorny edges of life. Her first memoir, The Recovering: Intoxication and its after-math (2018), recounts her journey from addiction to sobriety – or, rather, the cycle of addiction, denial, acceptance, sobriety, and relapse that defined her path to sobriety. Like all members of Alcoholics Anonymous, she is not alone in this messy recovery, and her first memoir reflects this by incorporating a multitude of other stories to sustain its central narrative. As with many of Jamison’s essays in The Empathy Exams (2014) and Make It Scream, Make It Burn (2019), The Recovering connects her own subjectivity to the stories of others.

Robyn Arianrhod is a science writer, and an affiliate of Monash’s School of Mathematics. Her reviews have appeared in Australian Book Review, The Age, Times Higher Education, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Cosmos, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Her latest book is Vector: A surprising story of space, time, and mathematical transformation (UNSW Press, 2024).

When did you first write for ABR?

I first reviewed in 2019. The book was The Best Australian Science Writing 2019.

What makes a fine critic?

Intellectual honesty, relevant knowledge, attentive engagement with the work, and good writing. It’s also important that reviewers of narrative non-fiction show readers that such books tell stories or set a context that is broader, deeper, than quick Wiki facts or the best single-topic online articles.

Which critics most impress you?

I first learned the power of great critical writing from the likes of Virginia Woolf, Susan Sontag, and Christopher Hitchens. I didn’t always agree with their tone or conclusions, but what depth, insight, and fine use of language!

Do you accept most books on offer or are you selective?

I take on most offers, because I find it an interesting challenge to engage critically with a range of books.

What qualities do you look for in an editor?

For both books and reviews I appreciate useful advice on passages where I need to clarify my meaning, smooth my grammar, and check my punctuation. (I’ve learnt to curb my use of exclamation marks, although secretly I still like them!) With books, I also look for guidance in shaping the project. Blending my two hats, I really like the fact that ABR allows authors to respond to excessively negative reviews, and critics to respond in turn. For too long, authors have been advised not to respond to negative reviews, and I wish more editors would encourage this two-way interaction: it’s a deeper way of engaging author, critic, and reader.

Do you write with a particular kind of reader in mind?

As both a writer and critic of popular science books, I write for readers who are intrigued by science, even if they don’t know a lot about it. I know that such books and reviews can require a significant investment of thought and attention, so I like to imagine book-loving readers who enjoy ‘brain candy’.

Do you receive feedback from readers or authors?

I’m grateful for the feedback I’ve received from readers of my books and, in the case of reviews, from both readers and authors. But I haven’t had any responses to my ABR reviews yet – not even when I’ve hoped to promote discussion!

What do you think of negative reviews?

As a writer, I’ve learned from constructive criticism, and as a prospective reader of a book I welcome it. But either way nit-pickers drive me mad – the kind of critic who spends too much limited review space on minor points, or dissecting something in which they are expert but which is a relatively small part of the book under review. In my own reviews, I try hard to ensure that negative criticism is proportionate.

I am also wary of negative reviews proclaiming that the reviewer would have tackled the topic, or structured and written the book, better than the author. Valid criticisms of style and substance are necessary, but this should be constructive, not dismissive or self-serving. I have mixed feelings about uncurated reader review websites, where perceptive, engaged assessments sit alongside glib, ill-informed judgements, or anonymous star ratings that are based merely on personal preference. A good critic reviews in a much broader context than whether or not they personally ‘liked’ the book. And yet, some of the most irresponsibly negative reviews I have seen have been from partisan professionals.

Good criticism takes time, energy, and skill – and it is vital in introducing readers to new books, and to ways of reading those books. Understandably, experts are wary of popularisers misrepresenting or trivialising their subjects. Alain de Botton’s pioneering popular philosophy books spring to mind for having riled some academic reviewers, although their negative reviews did spark useful debate about accessibility. So, there is an art to reviewing popular non-fiction: calling out lack of rigour and misleading simplifications, not uncommon among ‘bestsellers’, but recognising when an author conveys the essence of the subject accurately and accessibly. 

How do you feel about reviewing people you know?

Generally, I’d prefer not to.

What’s a critic’s primary responsibility?

To be fair to both author and reader. Also, to offer informed insight, rather than a simple summary.

As an author yourself: what do you look for in reviews of your own books?

I hope for a (preferably generous but definitely fair-minded) critic who will review the book on its own terms. I am delighted when a reviewer ‘gets’ the big picture of what I have attempted and explains this to readers – and when the storytelling and conceptual explanations are appreciated, too.

Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.

It has been a while since white historical novelists delved boldly into magical realms, evoking communities grown in unheimlich clusters over unceded land. Meanwhile, Aboriginal realist techniques have flourished in the novels of Alexis Wright and in stories such as Ellen Van Neerven’s ‘Water’ (Heat and Light, 2016). Such works resist Eurocentric lineages of magical realism, evoking Country-specific stories of spirituality and belonging that do not subjugate Indigenous knowledges or reductively romanticise ‘Blak works’ as purely magical.

Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

Fiona McFarlane’s new short story collection proceeds in fealty to this idea, though in a darkling and inverted manner. Each of Highway 13’s fictions is concerned with murder, the ultimate de-creative act. Such deaths cruelly amputate the full potentialities of a human being, and not just in isolation. The loss of a child, sibling, lover, partner, or friend rends the social fabric; it alters lives, now and into the future. But a cluster of such deaths generates something bleaker still. Entire townships and communities are warped by the pain engendered. Social networks are scrambled and degraded. Whole families are disarticulated by grief, while trauma can recur down the generations in a manner almost epigenetic. The dead travel widely, too, in the form of shadows cast by every effort made by survivors to out-run them.

The title of Rodney Hall’s thirteenth novel, Vortex, means to convey something of its considerable formal and thematic ambitions. The implicit promise is that its various elements, however fragmented or disparate they may seem, will converge with the swirling inexorability of a whirlpool or a black hole. As a dynamic metaphor for the novel’s wide-ranging vision of history, the title might be interpreted as the opposite of a widening gyre, a repudiation of the terrifying prospect of mere anarchy, an affirmation of the idea that there is a shape (and indeed a gravity) to events that grants them a kind of coherence, though the fact that the ordering centre of a vortex is also the point of annihilation is hardly reassuring.

One can only push such a metaphor so far before it begins to break down, which is perhaps why Vortex proposes another. It is mentioned at several points in the novel, but stated most explicitly by a Hungarian philosopher and philologist named Dr Antal Bródy, one of several European émigré characters. The English word for ‘history’, he observes, is derived from the Greek istoria, which originally denoted a web. When his interlocutor wonders if the word has something to do with ‘his story’, Bródy’s reply is blunt: ‘Not a story at all.’

Someone has left the day wide open here
But no one ever comes to mow the grass.
A man stands out of earshot, just a flash

There is a great deal going on in Christine Paice’s new novel, The Oxenbridge King. In this narrative, we meet the troubled soul of Richard III (1452-85), unable to find rest, a contemporary young woman who struggles with loss and misjudged relationships, an angel emerging from his chrysalis after being trapped for centuries in the cellar of the family home, and a talking bird that operates as a link between characters, places, times. In what can feel like dreamlike jolts, the parallel immediacies of 500 years ago and today keep warping and collapsing into each other.

Recent decades have seen no shortage of what might broadly be called diasporic Australian novels. Works by Brian Castro and Michelle de Kretser, among others, come to mind. Raeden Richardson adds fruitfully to this tradition with his complex début novel, The Degenerates, which sets out from then-Bombay and journeys to the streets of Melbourne and New York. It is not quite a ‘constellation novel’ (the term coined by Polish novelist Olga Tokarczuk), in which textual fragments and polyphonic voices build a narrative. Richardson nevertheless offers a series of story threads that slowly accumulate and nudge the boundaries of conventional form and storytelling.

‘Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do –’

Judith Wright

Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.

It feels impossible not to go into a collection with such a title expecting ninety-two pages of heavily naturalistic and pastoral imagery. Indeed, things kick off with the poem ‘one year one garden’, which, somewhat perversely, just lists a bunch of birds. It is like a copy-and-pasted eBird checklist from the Blue Mountains. And with this, what Fagan seems to say is: grab your binoculars and 600mm telephoto lenses, folks, let’s chill out and appreciate nature for a while.

Valerie and Yvonne Cohen were ‘artful’ in more ways than one. Both sisters were artists, and most of their friends and lovers were artists. They were ‘artistic’, seeking an unconventional life. For years they spent their winters on a tiny tropical island. And they – particularly Val – were artful dodgers.

Their cousin Penny Olsen knew them best in their old age in Melbourne: Von died in 2004 when she was almost ninety, and Val, the older sister by two years, died in 2008. Olsen had long been fascinated by the almost inseparable sisters and the family stories about their romantic lives. In Olsen’s experience, Val was the feisty one and Von the passive accomplice. Val would masquerade as a poor, helpless little old lady in op shop clothes, while grinding down the tradie or the butcher to accept a far lower price. But they came from a wealthy family and were always well-off.

The monsoon has now settled the dust stirred up during an eventful and blisteringly hot early summer in India. From April to June, in seven stages of voting and in temperatures that in some parts reached the high forties Celsius, almost 650 million people cast their votes in the largest election ever organised. The polls and the pundits predicted another big victory for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Yet when the verdict came, it surprised most observers. The BJP, supported by its coalition partners, was returned to office with far fewer seats than expected, and with Modi’s political authority much diminished.

At the start of the election campaign, Modi had set his aim high, with a characteristically catchy slogan: ‘Abki Baar, 400 Paar’. Translating into ‘this time surpassing 400’, it focused attention on Modi’s ambition to win more than 400 parliamentry seats. In the end, it fell well short. The BJP won just 240 seats out of the 543 in the lower house of India’s Parliament (the Lok Sabha), down from 303 in the previous election in 2019. Together with seats won by no fewer than fourteen allies, this secured the NDA a total of 293 seats in Parliament and a slim majority.

If Modi himself was unsettled by this outcome, he gave little sign in the days that followed. His victory speeches were upbeat, and he promised to fulfil his election promises in their entirety. He moved swiftly to appoint a Cabinet, retaining many long-serving ministers in their pre-election roles, and reappointed key officials, like the National Security Adviser, Ajit Doval. Everything that could be done to create an impression of confidence and control was done, quickly and efficiently.

It did not take long, however, for cracks to appear in this façade. Some were produced by fresh tensions and others by older ones within the government and the wider Hindu nationalist movement, from which Modi and the BJP derive support. Soon after the election results were published, the NDA’s newly empowered coalition partners – the Telugu Desam Party from Andhra Pradesh and the Bihar-based Janata Dal (United) – began to agitate for bigger slices of the national budget for their states. Within the BJP, disputes broke out about who should take the blame for the party’s relatively poor performance in North India, in states where it is traditionally strong. National leaders in New Delhi blamed local leaders – especially in populous and pivotal Uttar Pradesh – and vice versa.

Kári Gíslason’s memoir of escape and adventure during his early adulthood begins in transit: he is freshly eighteen, ‘sleeping on the floor next to hot air vents at the back of a grand old ferry that connected Brindisi in the heel of Italy with Athens’. Kári is travelling with an ‘often-jolly, sometimes sarcastic’ Scotsman named Paul, and their relationship has begun to fray. Worse, they are low on money, which means their travels and ‘freedom’ may soon be over. Gíslason notes: ‘We were unemployable. I was sickly thin, and my hair past my shoulders and knotted. Paul always looked like he’d just woken up.’ Both are searching for ways to forget their troubles and orient themselves as they take the first steps into manhood, but the pressures that come with such a task have left them feeling oppressed and alienated.

Fortunately, a woman who runs a tourist hostel in Corfu offers to take them in and helps them to find work. They can repay her later. This is a consistent theme of Running with Pirates: the people of Corfu are generous with their hospitality, offering shelter, food, employment, and friendship, with one exception: ‘They lock away their girls as though they’re some kind of fragile possessions that need to be kept safe.’

The practice of making a garden is simple. Prime the soil, choose and arrange the plants, tend it, water it, enjoy it. The complications arise with the awareness of the cultural, environmental, and personal elements. Is it your land or are you renting it from a landlord? Is the soil tainted with lead or other contaminants after centuries of industrialisation? Are the plants you have selected meaningful to you or just modish markers of good taste and affluence? Will your curation withstand extremes of anthropogenic climate change or will the plants struggle and perish, become overgrown by the botanical bully boys that can adapt and dominate?

The Garden Against Time is an account of Olivia Laing and her husband, the poet Ian Patterson, buying a house in Suffolk in the south of England in 2020. Although they loved the house, the unkempt garden was the main attraction. It had been designed by a previous owner, Mark Rumary, a beloved local gardener and, as his executor observes, a gay man ‘when it wasn’t good to be gay’. He designed it as a series of rooms, intentionally never allowing the whole to be visible all at once, a ‘secret garden’ quality that Laing loved. Rumary had planted a wide variety of species and cultivars, many now hidden below the overgrown vegetation. Laing refers to ‘the strange intimacy that went along with repairing his design’. With each day of hard work clearing and renovating the space, she finds new plants that have struggled for many seasons in overcrowded darkness, ready to be revived.

On 4 August 2020, a gigantic explosion in the Beirut docks devastated much of the city and the local economy. In this powerful and beautifully written memoir, Theodore Ell writes that while opaque causes must have been at work, the event itself was ‘senseless, random and barren’. He adds that the account he had given of the disaster in his Calibre Prize-winning essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’ (ABR, July 2021), erred in seeing the blast as ‘the climax of a narrative’. In fact, it was ‘the climax of nothing’.

Lebanon Days is an expanded and refocused version of the essay. Ell brings to memoir the skills of a published poet, a talent for the haunting vignette, and an extraordinary sensitivity to the chaotic palimpsest that is the history of this ancient place, whose modern identity resulted from a carve-up by colonial powers after World War I. (The book contains a useful Historical Timeline, together with a Glossary.)

Within the English language ‘elite’ is one of those French loan words comfortable enough in its new habitat to have dropped its accent in many publications (though not this magazine). Adopted substantially following France’s reckoning with its own élites after 1789, it joined other Gallic descriptors of high society such as ‘le bon ton’ and still retains a residual whiff of suspicious foreign origins. Crusading journalist William Cobbett preferred the robust old English term ‘the Thing’ to describe the interlocking networks of social, economic, and political privilege that misgoverned Britain in the aftermath of revolution. Usage of ‘elite’ only soared after World War II, and especially from the 1950s, when cognate terms such as ‘the Establishment’ also became common coin. In its adjectival form in the United Kingdom, as in Australia, ‘elite’ retains some positive connotations. Generally, we are comfortable with the notion of élite athletes, as even the most cursory follower of the recent Olympic Games will have noted. As an adjective applied to other areas of life such as education and politics, or worse still as a noun, it has become a kind of slur.

So much so, argue the authors of this forensic dissection of Britain’s élite, that their subjects are almost allergic to describing themselves using the ‘e’ word. There are nice, knowing flashes of humour throughout this book. The opening vignette provides one of these. The authors recount sitting in the drawing room of a seven-bedroom Bloomsbury townhouse talking to a multi-millionaire, public-school- and Oxford-educated corporate lawyer. He bristles at their question as to whether he considers himself a member of the British élite with an irritated ‘complete rubbish’. The authors must have wished he had used ‘tosh’, ‘bosh’, or ‘twaddle’, but we can still easily conjure up the cut-glass accent in which this dismissal was delivered.

In Yes, Prime Minister, Sir Humphrey Appleby spells out the really important things in British life: Radio 3, the countryside, the law, and the universities – both of them. It is an amusing reminder that writing on higher education in the United Kingdom focuses on just a handful of institutions. In History in the House, Richard Davenport-Hines takes this approach much further – to just one discipline in a single Oxford college, Christ Church, known as ‘the House’.

An accomplished historian, Davenport-Hines has previously delved into twentieth-century British history, from Cambridge spies and the Profumo scandal to a celebrated biography of John Maynard Keynes. His writing is precise and engaging, relying on the specific to spell out wider trends in society.

Yves Rees’s accessible, entertaining study blends personal experience with rich archival research into a group of disparate women who followed their passion from Australia to the United States at a time when it was relatively easy for a white woman with talent and a few connections to just show up in Hollywood or New York and get to work. They are very different women – a surfer, a dentist, a concert pianist, a nurse, a decorator, an artist, a lawyer, and a writer – all fiercely courageous trailblazers in their own way. Travelling to Tomorrow weaves their stories together in a loosely chronological shape, using deep research to ground Rees’s imagining of these women’s hopes, dreams, achievements, and disappointments.

Drawing on a wide range of sources, from personal letters and photographs to traditional historical archives, Rees brings their stories to life in a study that balances narrative energy with academic rigor. We learn not only about the impressive accomplishments of these adventurous women. Rees also opens a window into their lives, conjuring them with vivid attention to sensory experience: the way New York glittered like a fairyland to a young artist on a boat sailing up the Hudson; the butterflies in the stomach of a law student about to address her class at the University of California; the fizzy impatience of a surfer just off the boat in Honololu, charming a reporter before rushing to catch the famous waves at Waikiki.

The Australian War Memorial (AWM) is unique among the former settler Dominions in our reluctance to acknowledge as warfare violent conquest and dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The national war museums of Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa all contain exhibits dedicated to military conflicts between First Nations and European colonisers, yet the AWM has for decades refused to heed calls for a frontier war gallery at Mount Ainslie. As veteran journalist David Marr noted earlier this year, while the AWM saw fit a decade ago to memorialise explosive detection dogs and their handlers, ‘we haven’t yet found the space in those halls to commemorate the war that is the basis of our country’s existence’. Kim Beazley, appointed in 2023 to chair the Australian War Memorial Council, recently signalled a shift in direction and has promised that the AWM will soon ‘give the Aboriginal population the dignity of resistance’.

Beazley faces strong opposition from conservatives who consider any change to the status quo as woke ‘capitulation’. Quadrant contributor Peter O’Brien, for example, insists there ‘were no frontier wars in the sense of a military conflict with organised Aboriginal forces defending their land against invasion’. It is a ‘myth’ devised to overturn the ‘accepted history that this land was annexed according to international law of the time and peacefully settled’ and, as a ‘political ploy’ to delegitimise the Australian nation, ‘has no place in the Memorial’. O’Brien claims that most violent acts against Indigenous people were carried out by private individuals who violated British and colonial laws. These illegal actions were not military operations and ‘were certainly not sanctioned by the colonial governments’. On the few occasions when troops were deployed, they constituted policing actions to aid ‘the civil power’.

Don’t judge a book by its cover? There is no problem with this book. The cover and artist’s note, declaring inspiration from such diverse art forms as traditional Indian miniature painting, Indian matchbox design, and a ‘harmonious blend of Indian and Australian flora’, encapsulate the intertwining narratives and cultural crossovers of the stories within.

The introduction by the editor, Aarti Betigeri, is headed by a sweet photograph, as are nearly all of the stories. Notes at the end of the book about the writers often reveal interesting lives shaped by childhood. The book is the latest in the Black Inc. Growing Up series and the first to appear under a national flag.

In the winter of 1937–38, Bertolt Brecht, a refugee from National Socialism, lived in furious exile in Svendborg, a small town on the Danish island of Funen. There he wrote and compiled a collection of poems under the working title ‘Gedichte im Exil’ (Poems in Exile). Sometime between galleys and the poet’s move to Sweden following the Munich Agreement, the book was renamed Svendborger Gedichte, the second section of which begins with a simple motto:

In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing
About the dark times.

‘Film critic’ rather undersells the breadth and depth of David Thomson’s engagement with the medium. A distinguished historian, biographer, novelist, and encyclopedist of film, he has also made documentaries, written screenplays, and been a respected judge on the international film festival circuit. He is widely regarded as the greatest living writer on film. It is fitting, then, that after more than twenty books on cinema he has finally turned his attention to war, a matter whose scope and import across the history of film provides a true match for his gifts.

Ironically, in light of this impressive resumé, Thomson’s key experience of war came as a participant, not an observer, when, as a child in early 1940s London, his parents’ home in South London was bombed by the Luftwaffe. This experience was ‘invaluable’, he reflected in later life, not only in teaching him how ‘a state of war had always been there’, but in providing perspective on his own and Britain’s privations: ‘We were not invaded, or put out on the streets as refugees; we were not sent to camps … Our outrages were very small compared with those that were available not far away.’ This insight organises, illuminates, and sharpens Thomson’s analysis of how, over more than a century, cinema has restaged and recreated war, the moral and historical artifices this has entailed, the misleading narratives it has generated, and the dangers that lie therein for all of us.

If you ever came across a vector in a high-school science class, it probably looked quite simple: a little arrow you might draw on a diagram to show the motion of a train or the forces on a swinging pendulum. An arrow pointing right would cancel an arrow pointing left, or → + ← = 0. Add together two arrows pointing in the same direction, you get one twice as long: →. A rightward arrow plus an upward one? You’ve got yourself a diagonal: → + ↑ =  ↗.

As it turns out, this arrow arithmetic is a handy way to think about numbers and spatial relationships, especially if you combine it with other kinds of mathematical gear like algebra and calculus. Although the vector picture was originally devised to describe the familiar three-dimensional space we live in, it can be expanded in surprising directions. Vectors turn up in the curved spacetime of Albert Einstein’s relativity and the weird twelve-dimensional universes of string theory, as well as in Google’s page-ranking algorithm and the abstract spaces with thousands of dimensions that modern AI models use to represent things like language and meaning. However, as mathematician and historian Robyn Arianrhod shows in her new book, Vector, the invention of this deceptively simple piece of conceptual technology took several thousand years.

Professor George Williams AO is the Vice-Chancellor and President at Western Sydney University. He commenced as Western Sydney University’s fifth Vice-Chancellor in July 2024, bringing decades of experience as a constitutional law scholar and teacher, senior leader in higher education, barrister and as a national thought leader. His latest book with David Hume is People Power: How Australian referendums are lost and won (UNSW Press, 2024).

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

To Western Sydney University! It is a bit sad I know, but I have just started as vice-chancellor and am thrilled to make a difference. Education changed my life, and I want that for others. There is no better place to achieve this, as two-thirds of our students are the first in their family to go to university and we have the highest number of low SES students in Australia.

What is your idea of hell?

A slow afternoon shopping for clothes.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Modesty. If you have something to be proud of, share it.

What’s your favourite film?

That is a tough one! By a nose, it would be the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended editions of course) over the original Star Wars trilogy (not to be confused with the prequels or the very disappointing sequels).

And your favourite book?

I do not usually like reading books a second time, but there are a few I come back to every few years. One is Earth Abides, a 1949 American post-apocalyptic science fiction novel by George R. Stewart. It is a forgotten classic that details the decline of civilisation after a worldwide plague.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine, historical or contemporary.

I would love to get J.R.R. Tolkien together with movie director Peter Jackson and screenwriter Fran Walsh. I suspect a bit of tension in the room over the adaptation of the Lord of the Rings novels and would love to see the reaction.

Which word do you most dislike, and which one would you like to see back in public usage?

Restaurant. It has nothing to do with the word itself, but I always struggle to spell it, going back to the fact that I paid so little attention to spelling in school. Thankfully, my dreadful aptitude for spelling has been made up for by good dictation systems. They have saved my writing career. ‘Forsooth’ deserves a comeback. It rolls off the tongue nicely.

Who is your favourite author?

George R.R. Martin would have got the nod for his Game of Thrones novels, but I have been waiting thirteen years for the next book, and that takes him down several notches. My favourite of all time is Stephen R. Donaldson. I love his willingness to subvert our expectations of fantasy in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and his science-fiction Gap series is breathtaking. His capacity to ratchet up the tension and reader engagement with complex characters and intricate plots is exactly what I look for at the end of the day.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

I cannot go past the true and loyal Samwise Gamgee.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

Brevity.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

The Lord of the Rings.

Name an early literary idol or influence whom you no longer admire – or vice versa.

Jane Austen’s novels have never appealed to me, but I loved the recent mash-up, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

The Daily by The New York Times

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

These days it is time. I had this in spades as an academic, but it declined precipitously when I became dean and then deputy vice-chancellor, and now has completely disappeared as vice-chancellor. My days as an author of books may now be over. My latest is my forty-third book, so it has not been a bad run.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

Engaging fairly with my writing and bringing something new and surprising to the table.

How do you find working with editors?

I am constantly impressed with their ability to point out errors and problems that I have somehow missed. I have been fortunate to work with wonderful editors across a range of publishers, especially UNSW Press and Federation Press.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They are such great fun. It is a privilege to engage directly with readers and to hear their take on your work. They also bring in energy that can be inspiring.

Are artists valued in our society?

Not as much as they should be.

What are you working on now?

I am learning on the job as a newly minted vice-chancellor. I am advocating on behalf of our students, including to do away with the unfair and highly damaging $50,000 cost of Arts degrees. The world needs more writers and philosophers.  g

For those of us who would like to see a revival of the ‘techno-critical’ tradition in public debate (the tradition of Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Ellul, Neil Postman, and Langdon Winner, inter many alia), it is a cause of some irritation that the hegemonic view of technology remains the instrumental one. Here, technology is deemed to be neutral, in a way that precludes any serious analysis of its constitutive role in human affairs. Technologies, it is said, are merely tools to serve the needs of their users; they have no political content per se. I can use a hammer to drive in a nail or bludgeon my next-door neighbour to death. It is my actions that matter, not the hammer itself.

One effect of the instrumental view (which will strike many readers as common sense) is to herd all discussions of new technologies towards the door marked ‘regulation’. For if technologies have no political content – if they do not shape, and are not shaped by, the societies into which they emerge – the issue of their relationship to ‘human nature’ or ‘the human condition’ will never arise. Instead, the discussion will tend to focus on matters of misuse or safety, before moving on to what the state can do to keep this or that technology within ‘guardrails’. The question of where the road between the guardrails is going, and where it originates – and indeed of who built the road, and why – is almost always left unasked.

Loïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

Enter Dominic Gordon, who, in Excitable Boy, writes Melbourne’s margins with punch and panache. He takes the reader to places we know exist but probably have not experienced: for example, the sedulous unpaid shiftwork of the night-time graffiti vandal, combining inks and dyes to add ‘toxicity to the stain’; and the world of the dedicated clothes stealer.

Think of Jean Genet, who described a criminal world smelling of ‘sweat, sperm, and blood’. Gordon shares the Parisian’s sexual adventurism, disengagement with quotidian morality, and conviction that the abject can be transmuted into art. Like Genet, he is unapologetic about his illegal activities. Gordon’s demesne is the world of ‘oddballs, addicts, loners, fugitives of self’. He documents the crackle of the ‘street orchestra in full swing,’ in an environment where ‘hard city shapes chop and change, jabbing in and out of each other like unfinished conversations’. The bloated, partially bogus Chopper Read books were a commercial phenomenon that titillated the law-abiding majority. By contrast, Gordon portrays the petty pleasures and dank longueurs of scuzzball-level criminality with alarming vividity – and, presumably, accuracy – without ever making it glitter.