Jason Steger leaves Fairfax

Happy the media company that can afford to shed almost a hundred journalists without jeopardising the quality of its newspapers. That’s what Nine has done, with eighty-five journalists, many of them senior ones, taking up voluntary redundancies from The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, and the Australian Financial Review. Among them were Jewel Topsfield, Royce Millar, Farrah Tomazin, Jack Latimore, Osman Faruqi, and Martin Boulton, as reported in the Guardian.

Much missed will be Jason Steger, who has for twenty-four years been literary editor of The Age and SMH – ‘the best job in journalism’, in his words. Jason has been the model of a literary editor: urbane, responsive, quick off the draw, and positively ubiquitous.

Nine’s loss is ABR’s gain. We look forward to publishing Jason’s own reviews, after he has taken a well-earned break.

Delivery blues

We were aghast to learn how long it took Australia Post to deliver the September issue to New South Wales subscribers. Some subscribers didn’t receive it until 12 September, despite the fact that we lodged the magazine with Australia Post on 29 August. Doubtless this is because of new efficiencies (those brutal economies). It should be noted that this laggard service comes after a twenty-five per cent increase in postage costs, which have done magazines of this kind no favours. 

As we went to press, ABR received this Orwellian explanation from Australia Post: ‘NSW are experiencing some delays with our normal seasonal spikes and an outage on our Flat Sorting Machine which reduced processing capacity.’

We trust these delays will not be repeated. Henceforth we will always note on the imprint page the date when we lodged new issues with Australia Post (this month it was 26 September). It always helps our cause when subscribers, if they have time, notify us when they received new issues. Please drop Rosemary Blackney, the Business Manager, a line at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Don’t forget, print subscribers are entitled to full online access, including the current issue (always available on or before the first day of the month), facsimile editions, and our unique digital archive going back to 1978.

Publishing masterclass

Each year, Peter Rose and the other ABR editors lead a three-week publishing masterclass for PhD students at Monash University. The aim is simple: to introduce young scholars to the magazine, to acquaint them with what it has to offer freelancers and early-career scholars, and to encourage them to think about writing for magazines of this kind, taking their specialist knowledge and making it available in lucid form to general readers.

The outcomes, since the first of these series in 2018, have been consistently positive. Anders Villani is a salient example. He stood out in the 2020 class and promptly received a commission. Since then Anders, an exceptional young poet, has written for ABR on many occasions, critically and creatively. He was named our 2021 Rising Star, and he continues to help John Hawke and our Editor to select the poems that appear in our pages (Toby Davidson and Claire Gaskin being our October poets).

This year’s cohort (twenty-five PhD students from across the Faculty of Arts) was particularly impressive. We always offer at least two of the students paid commissions in ABR, based on the quality of their ‘assignments’ – a book review or a short commentary. This year we ended up offering commissions to six students. They are Jing (Jenny) Hu, Jonathan Ricketson, Kim Troxler, Jacky Watt, Arwen Verdnik, and Harrison Croft (who reviews a new book on page 57). We look forward to publishing them all in coming months.

The publishing masterclass, like the internship program that brings a dozen undergraduates to ABR’s office in Southbank throughout the year to give them an intensive entrée to publishing, is a key feature of the magazine’s partnership with Monash University’s Faculty of Arts, which goes back to 2016.

Julia da Costa

Will Hunt, ABR’s new Assistant Editor, came to us last year as one of those Monash interns (it’s been quite an ascent, but as our Editor has been known to say, ‘Just make yourself indispensable’). Will now designs our covers, and what a fine one he has produced this month. It features Julia da Costa, a citizen of Timor-Leste, photographed by Marcus Salvagno.

Born in the mid-1950s, in the village of Cainliu, Julia da Costa survived aerial bombings during the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, only to lose many members of her family, including her sole child, to the ensuing famine. Julia had no other biological children, but she has raised many orphans whose parents had died because of famine or privations; Julia’s selfless support enabled one of them to gain a BA in Indonesia.

Trained by her mother and grandmother, Julia is a master weaver of Tais; she has passed on these skills to younger generations of Timorese women and children. Weaving is integral to the preservation of East Timorese culture and identity.

Clinton Fernandes writes about East Timor, its memory, and Timorese weaving in his cover article (page 9).

As we go to print, an exhibition opens at Trinity College at Melbourne University, featuring rare and significant Timorese Tais. ‘Tais, Culture and Resilience: Woven stories from Timor-Leste’ marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Timor’s independence and tells the story of the central role that women played in the independence struggle during Indonesia’s brutal occupation. As with Julia da Costa, every Tais tells a story, and together these Tais tell of an astonishing history and culture on our doorstep.

Get festive

While literary pages in our media shrink, literary festivals bloom. Could this suggest a thirst for cultural conversation? As Sebastian Smee notes in his Open Page interview on page 41, the literary festival is not nearly as common in the United States, while it seems to be a defining aspect of our literary culture. Advances has heard of three new festivals based in Carlton, Westernport, and Phillip Island, which together with the Queenscliff Literary Festival, celebrating its tenth year with speakers including Tim Winton, Alexis Wright, Pip Williams and Josh Bornstein, makes for a very stimulating Victorian literary circuit.

Missing the chance

Dear Editor,

Dominic Kelly’s surgery on Frank Brennan’s and Damien Freeman’s analysis of the failed Aboriginal and Torres Voice referendum (ABR, September 2024) reveals how blinkered all three of these worthy commentators remain about bipartisanship. By putting the issue into the populist arena, the Albanese government lost the chance of the century. All state Labor governments and the Liberal-held Tasmanian legislature supported the Voice, as did the Territory Assemblies. Section 51, Article 37 of the Australian Constitution allows the federal Parliament, working in tandem with state legislatures, to enlarge federal legislative power without approval by a national referendum. Long before the vote on 14 October 2023, John Menadue’s wonderful Pearls & Irritations published this analysis. Not a single voice challenged that prospect.

Bernard Collaery

Dominic Kelley replies:

I thank Bernard Collaery for his comment. Not being a constitutional lawyer, I will leave to others the analysis of whether his alternate proposal for establishing the Voice is technically achievable, but convention and political reality suggests that it is a rather fanciful proposal.

Twenty-five years ago, an international peacekeeping force entered East Timor, delivered it from Indonesian occupation, and placed it under United Nations administration. Known as the International Force East Timor (InterFET), it had 11,000 troops from twenty-three countries and was commanded by an Australian major general. Everything about these events seemed miraculous. East Timor’s independence had long been regarded as impossible; a top adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt observed during World War II that it might eventually achieve self-government, but ‘it would certainly take a thousand years’. Indonesia invaded East Timor in 1975 while the latter was in the process of decolonising from Portugal, annexed it the following year, and declared its rule ‘irreversible’.

Davids don’t usually beat Goliaths. East Timor is less than one-tenth the size of Victoria. It had no land border with a friendly state, no foreign source of weapons, no liberated areas for its fighters to recover, no air force, no navy, no armoured vehicles or artillery to speak of. Indonesia was geopolitically significant, with vast natural resources and a strategic location along the main sea and air lanes between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, the leading state in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, and, with the largest Muslim population in the world, an influential member of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. This vast disparity of power makes East Timor’s victory unique in the history of insurgencies and independence struggles.

How did it win, and what can other self-determination struggles learn from it? Born of Fire and Ash: The Official History of Australian operations in East Timor (2022) and an exhibition of East Timorese women’s textiles currently on display at Melbourne University both shed valuable light on these questions.

Official histories are ‘official’ in the sense that a government gives selected historians access to its internal records, and those historians focus primarily on government decisions and actions. A clearance process excludes only classified information whose disclosure would still cause harm to Australia’s defence, international relations, or national security. The final product conveys the historians’ interpretations and judgements, not the government’s preferred line.

Media owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even anti-media mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.

Seventy-three-year-old Eric Beecher has been a journalist, editor, and media proprietor. As a reporter on The Age and the youngest-ever editor of its stablemate The Sydney Morning Herald in the 1980s, he and his colleagues knew (or know now) that they were charmed participants in a golden age of journalism, underpinned by rivers of classified advertising. By 1990, Beecher had quit the Murdoch payroll, going on to co-found Text Publishing and Private Media Publishers, with titles including Crikey, and receiving a Walkley Award for Industry Leadership.

A few years after delivering the 2000 Andrew Olle Media Lecture on the future of quality journalism in the online environment, Beecher scrutinised the Fairfax business at its board’s request. His thirty-seven-page report, in which he raised the prospect of a doomsday scenario that could wipe out most of the company’s profits as print ads migrated to the internet, famously enraged at least one director and failed to hasten Fairfax in addressing its existential crisis.

People have peculiar but passionate views about referendums. A large number swear that in 1974 and 1988 the people voted against referendums on the existence of local government. To them, local government is ‘unconstitutional’, so they don’t have to pay their council rates. Members of the same cohort also proclaim that they have a constitutional right to trial by jury for state criminal offences and a right to compensation on just terms if a state compulsorily acquires their land.

But the history of referendums in Australia tells the opposite story. The referendums in 1974 and 1988 on local government concerned whether the Commonwealth could fund local government directly and whether local government bodies had to be elected. The defeat of these referendums made no difference to the existence and powers of local government bodies, which are governed by state laws. So yes, people still have to pay their rates.

The year 1939 was not so very unlike this one. The United States was being torn apart by bitter political disagreements, and the unresolved social divisions and underlying disparities that had haunted the nation from birth were increasingly laid bare. Of these, racial inequality was perhaps most shameful: African American men, women, and children were forced to live a separate existence from that of their fellow citizens, whether due to de jure segregation in the South or the no less pernicious zoning ordinances that kept black families out of middle-class neighbourhoods in the North.

There were class divisions, too, that went deep and were deeply injurious. A decade into the Great Depression, ten million people remained unemployed. Factory workers in cities were reeling from a sudden rise in the cost of living and the looming prospect of homelessness. Rural communities groaned under the weight of intergenerational poverty and unmanageable debt, while migrant farmers on the West Coast eked out the barest and most meagre of livings – desperate existences forever memorialised in the photography of Dorothea Lange and John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Though scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

That attack and two other terrorist actions that day, all using hijacked commercial airliners, caused nearly three thousand deaths in total. It was the deadliest attack on American soil since the Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941. By the evening of 9/11, as the date quickly came to be called, the CIA had determined that the terrorist organisation Al Qaeda, led by Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden and based in Afghanistan, had planned and carried out the four attacks with just nineteen men.

The Covid-19 pandemic has left its mark on all of us. How could it not? The shuttered small businesses; the warring states; the spectre of aged care residents, hands pressed against glass, unable to touch or receive relatives. The Centrelink queues, the taped-up playgrounds, the closed borders. The stranded cruise ships, the panic buying of toilet paper, the unrelenting and crushing boredom of our four walls. Personally, I can’t see a North Face jacket without a visceral flashback to our erstwhile Victorian premier and his trademark press conference opener: ‘We right to go?’ The desire to forget all of this, to move on from the pandemic, is what makes Australia’s Pandemic Exceptionalism: How we crushed the curve but lost the race such an important contribution to the literature of Covid-19 post-mortems.

Economists Steven Hamilton and Richard Holden were regular contributors to the op-ed pages during lockdowns, heartily supporting the fiscal response, and lambasting our costly dithering in vaccine procurement (an ‘unmitigated disaster’) and the sluggish roll-out of rapid antigen tests, or RATs (‘unconscionable’). They have synthesised their individual contributions into a shared argument: the Morrison government both succeeded and failed in its response to Covid-19, and there are vital lessons to be learnt.

home

For German literary critic Walter Benjamin, translation belongs to the ‘afterlife’ of a work, by which he means the ‘transformation and a renewal of something living’. In this sense, a new translation extends this afterlife, renews and sustains it. This does not mean every new translation is worthy of the original, but it does bring it back into the light.

It has been twenty years since Penguin released new translations of Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu. For the first time, the novel’s seven volumes were translated not by one but by several translators, under the guiding hand of a general editor. The same approach has been taken for the new Oxford World’s Classics translation, with Brian Nelson translating the first and last volumes and acting as general editor. Nelson is an experienced translator who is best known for his translations of Émile Zola.

John Kinsella may well be Australia’s most prolific author – of poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction. His extensive body of work is renowned for its obsessive concern, its fixation even, with a single place: the Western Australian wheatbelt,  where Kinsella has spent most of his life. While psychoanalysis has fallen out of favour, Kinsella’s regionalism has the character of a repetition compulsion, a syndrome Freud related to unresolved trauma. In fact, what often underlies Kinsella’s repeated envisioning of the wheatbelt is the unresolved trauma of colonialism, as the land and all who rely on it – people but also animals and plants – suffer from the impacts of modernity. In this new short-story collection, Beam of Light, colonial ecocide provides the background for almost every story. At the foreground is a misfit, a figure certainly not unrelated to the colonial condition.

Readers familiar with Robbie Arnott’s fiction will have some expectations about the kind of book the author is likely to conjure. Dusk sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored, particularly in The Rain Heron (2020) and the wonderful Limberlost (2022). Dusk features Arnott’s typically vivid descriptive prose and his concern with the natural world and our place within it. Dusk generates pathos with delicate expertise and mixes genres while retaining a strong semblance of realism.

Dusk’s protagonists are twins, Iris and Floyd Renshaw, who rely on and complement each other, and have done so for the entirety of their thirty-seven years. They learn that a puma is ‘taking shepherds up in the highlands’ and killing the hunters who tried to catch it. They only half-believe the story, but the rumoured bounty is enough to pique their interest.

In Street to Street (2012), Brian Castro wrote, ‘It was important that he was making the gesture, running in the opposite direction from a national literature.’ In Chinese Postman, Castro’s protagonist Abraham Quin is ‘through with all that novel-writing; it’s summer reading for bourgeois ladies’. Quin is a Jewish-Chinese former professor, bearing sufficient similarities to the author to function as an avatar. Quin and Castro are the same age, have written the same number of books, and live in the same place (the Adelaide Hills). Sometimes Quin speaks as Quin, sometimes the author chooses to make his ventriloquism evident, and sometimes the identity of the narrator is unclear, but the voice is always raffish, erudite, mercurial.

Not much happens externally, but reading Castro for plot is like listening to Bob Dylan for melody (to repurpose a prime-ministerial philistinism). The belt conveying us through the pages is Quin beginning and continuing an email correspondence with Iryna Zarębina, a woman trapped by the war in Ukraine. ‘To be an epistolarian is not to find solace in written words,’ the narrator claims. Their relationship unfurls like the kirigami flower Quin tosses in a lake. Is Iryna who she purports to be? Can Quin be the man he wants to seem to be?

The book’s true locomotion is the rhythm of the writing, drummed by kinetic sentences with the balance and bravura of Nijinsky. In a period where flat, declarative prose predominates, Castro provides caffeinating playfulness, accretion of rhizomic detail, butt-joining of rarified fragments, and uncanny interiority at no extra cost. The recently departed John Barth said of the novel that ‘[t]he process is the content, more or less’. Chinese Postman provides content as process, with whatever Castro is reading, thinking, or feeling providing grist, but without the superficiality that mars much autofiction.

This could have been the perfect literary bomboniere – typically handsome Giramondo presentation, prose luminous as an Easter moon, studded with jokes sly and shameless: bung on a bow and there’s Christmas fixed. But gravitas saves it from that helium fate. There is grit beneath the shimmer: the financial precarity of dedicated artists; the unbleachable stains of anti-Semitism and sinophobia; the brute realities of war. And, bracketing all, candid admissions of deep melancholy: the indignities of ageing; the timpani-tap of impending death; the fruitless fretting on whether contemporary publication will confer a posthumous foothold in an amnesiac culture.

There is deep pleasure to be derived from Castro’s game-playing – the intertextuality, paronomasia, and detonations of small grenades, paragraphs or pages after the pin has been pulled. Simultaneously, the dizzying erudition and scallywag sensibility can have the reader jumping at shadows. His neighbour is called Paul. A link to the epistolary New Testament chap? Pall, as in smoke from a burning library? Paul is married to Norma who, in Vincenzo Bellini’s opera, had Pollione as a lover. Or is sometimes a Paul simply a Paul? Does hypervigilance for hypercleverness lead to joining-the-dots where no dots were pricked? (Paul’s son is Bartby. Quin describes himself as a scrivener. Paul’s surname is Boswell. Dot, dot, dot.)

It is a novel, not a cryptic crossword, but temptations to pick at the rich encoding abound. Is the name A. Quin an echo of the lamented writer Ann, whose best-known novel Berg (1964) was preoccupied with doubling and upside-downness? When Quin remembers the tragic figure Gong Boy, is it to trigger Qinggong, the Chinese martial art technique for leaping off vertical surfaces? Sometimes he keeps it obvious, such as Pontius Pilate’s being followed by the locution ‘conscious pilot’, or AD (Anno Domino) and HD (the poet) plugging into ADHD. Elias Canetti, mentioned twice, is one spark in a recurring theme of book burning. Quin sets fire to his own library. Given scattered references elsewhere to Warsaw and Kosciuszko, and his penchant for pairing, Castro may be gesturing towards the twice-destroyed Zaluski Library. Or maybe not.

Victor Hugo cautioned, ‘Puns are the droppings of soaring wits.’ (A lovelier translation is ‘Puns are the guano of the winged mind.’) Success or otherwise hinges on personal taste. ‘Shall I wear a nappy rolled? Part my shirt-tail behind?’ Tick. ‘Farting is such cheap callow.’ Cross. There is a recipe for rabbit curry, a riotous anecdote about a disastrous public reading equal to anything in James Kelman’s God’s Teeth and Other Phenomena (2022), and epigrams by the bushel. One, of many: ‘Religion is beautifully built like an automatic rifle and just as universally deadly.’ And yet, the riskiest move for the ironist is sincerity. ‘He lost his perfect pitch and he lost his usual skill in playing with words and coupling etymologies to invent new wakes for old Finnegan … Now, to give up mirrors was the next step: no reflection or signalling; just sit and watch the rain; close the door against ambition.’ His foreigner’s voice ‘jumps here and there and keeps trying to return to somewhere else with the energy of a wren … small and fragile’. Tom Paulin wrote of uselessly intricate sonnets and crossword puzzles: ‘Their bitter / constraints and formal pleasures were a style / of being perfect in despair; they spoke / with the vicious trapped crying of a wren.’ Castro’s despair may be perfect, but the wren is calling gamely to other creatures, and that choice is heroic.

Another remarkable aspect of this novel is the preoccupation with defecation. Castro grounds his eschatology in scatology. The extensive history of faecopoetics embraces Chaucer, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Karl Ove Knausgård, and many others, but it is difficult to recall another book that makes such extensive use of toileting in all its moods and (com)modes. Given Castro’s long-standing interest in Freud, what can be discerned from Quin’s memory that his mother ‘had her little bag of gold always with her’? In ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’ (1908) Freud documented folkloric links between gold and faeces across various cultures, adding, ‘We know that the gold which the devil gives his paramours turns into excrement after his departure.’ Could this apply to Quin’s overtures to his potential paramour? American academic Mary Foltz has argued that literary representations of defecation concentrate the reader’s mind on impacts of waste, environmental and cultural, but this seems too woolly for Castro (although he tenders ‘literary memory grows out of waste, of schadenfreude and shit’). More likely, he wants to highlight what is at stake – everything: life and death – a nod to the popular crudity, ‘If you don’t shit, you die.’ Or maybe he just wants to get on the cans with Manzoni.

In ‘The Uncanny’ (Das Unheimliche, 1919) Freud examined the meaning and significance of the words ‘heimlich’ and ‘unheimlich’, terms Quin/Castro exercises. (When Quin’s dog chokes to death, he is too laggard to save him with the Heimlich manoeuvre.) Freud argued that the idea of an eternal soul ‘was the first double of the body. From having been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death.’ Quin’s ongoing defecation dramas are a reminder both of mortality, and that he is still alive; whereas his printed words, which will outlast his physical body, might not guarantee being remembered, let alone immortality. Future judgements must remain uncertain. For now, far from being the ‘dried cricket in a matchbox’ he suggests, Castro’s soaring stridulation is an adornment to literature, regardless of the nation of origin.

The story of the only female pope (to date) emerged in the thirteenth century, and for some time thereafter was widely disseminated in Europe. She was initially alleged to have lived in the twelfth century, but what would become the best-known version of the story placed her election as pope in the year 855. The pontificate of ‘John Anglicus’ was said to have lasted for approximately two and a half years, between those of Leo IV and Benedict III. The story, which may have originated as parody, flourished in credence. The head of ‘Johannes VIII, Femina de Anglia’ was included in a series of busts of the legitimate popes in the nave of the Cathedral of Siena until 1600, when Pope Clement VIII ordered its removal and formally declared that the impostor pope had never existed. With no contemporary evidence substantiating the audacious tale of ‘Pope Joan’, it appears to have been a kind of medieval urban legend. Despite this, her appeal to artists and writers persists, adaptations of the story including two film versions, novels, plays, and (premièring in 2011) a musical.

Whenever I spot the new flyers of our university’s student communist club, all I can do is admire the gumption. Talk about seriously swimming against the tide, the political equivalent of hawking CDs in a Spotify world. When just broaching the topic of negative gearing can torpedo a major political party in this country, what chance is there that the kids are going to abolish private property altogether? The truth is that communism’s only active role in the West today is playing the bogeyman, a danger label to be slapped on anything conservatives find insufficiently conservative. See, for example, the current US vice-president, who had only to politely request a little more corporate tax, please, sir, and voila, she’s Comrade Kamala, cackling her way to the gulag.

Angela Hewitt, one of the world’s leading concert pianists, appears in recital and as soloist with major orchestras throughout Europe, the Americas, Australia, and Asia. Her interpretations of the music of J.S. Bach have established her as one of the composer’s foremost interpreters of our time. Her latest Australian tour takes in Adelaide, Melbourne, Bendigo, and Sydney, from 9 to 15 October.

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

I heard the Russian pianist Emil Gilels play when I was five years old in my hometown of Ottawa, Canada, and I can still remember seeing him on stage. After the concert, I was taken to his dressing room to get his autograph. I have it to this day. 

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

I was always doing ‘artistic’ things. I started classical ballet at the same time as piano, age three, and loved dancing. I did it for twenty years. I also played violin and recorder, sang, did Scottish dancing. But when I was fifteen years old and started lessons with Jean-Paul Sevilla, a French pianist who came to Canada from Paris, I realised the piano was what I must do full time, because the repertoire for the instrument interested me enormously and it was what I did best.

What’s the most brilliant individual performance you have ever seen?

I heard the great Spanish pianist Alicia de Larrocha play the complete Iberia by Albéniz in one recital – actually twice: once in Toronto and once in Paris. Unforgettable. And it’s fantastic music.

Name three performers (present-day or historical) you would like to work with?

Well ‘historical’ performers, you know … they’re dead! Of course, it wouldn’t be bad to play with Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. 

Do you have a favourite song?

The pieces I play in concert are not really called ‘songs’. But I do love playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations (eighty-two minutes non-stop). In 2025, I celebrate fifty years of performing this work, of which I never tire. It’s glorious music and perhaps the most moving piece of all.

Your favourite play or opera?

Anything by Mozart.

How do you regard the audience?

As my friends. It’s important to me to meet people in the lobby following a concert. I always treat them with the greatest respect and gratitude.

What’s your favourite theatre or concert hall?

The fifteenth-century courtyard of the Castle of the Knights of Malta in Magione, Umbria, Italy where I give concerts during my Trasimeno Music Festival each summer. It’s magical.

Do you read your own reviews?

The ones that pop up on my computer, yes. Most of them. Not all anymore. Mind you, nowadays there are very few. One looks more at the comments on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. Sad, really.

What’s the best thing government could do for artists?

Make musical education available for all from childhood.

What advice would you give an aspiring artist?

Work hard. Be disciplined. And enjoy it! Communicate to your audience when you play.

What’s the best advice you have ever received?

Always make your own decisions.

What’s your next project or performance?

I play in London’s Wigmore Hall on 24 September. The first half is Scarlatti and Bach – different pieces from the ones I present in Australia. In the second half, I play Brahms’s monumental Sonata in F minor, Op. 5 – again, a different work from the one audiences will hear on my Australian tour in October. I always have so much repertoire to work on. It takes hours and hours of practice to learn and keep in shape. People have no idea! 

William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Wu Zetian’s zealous patronage saw Buddhism become the dominant religion of China. As Dalrymple writes, ‘never again would the civilisation of India and China be bound together so intimately’. Today, about half of the world’s 500 million Buddhists live in China. There is a stream of cultural exchange involving Buddhists visiting important centres of learning in India and China. The world’s remaining Buddhists belong to a long history of the migration of monks, teachers, ideas, traders, and pilgrims between the home of Buddhism in northern India and other parts of Asia and Central Asia. Borobudur in Indonesia, for instance, remains the largest Buddhist temple ever built. This and many other cultural icons prompt Dalrymple to suggest that Buddhism has been one of the greatest transformational influences in world history. Given the pivotal role of India in that process, the book represents a critical counterpoint to the existing scholarly work that focuses much more on the Chinese-Central, Asian-Persian spheres of influence.

Sebastian Smee, born in 1972 in Adelaide, is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning art critic at The Washington Post. He has written widely about art and is the author of The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art and Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism. He lives in Boston.

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

Dakar, in Senegal. I’ve never been to Africa. A friend who went recently said it was incredible.

What’s your idea of hell?

Having to read nothing but academic dissertations for a year.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Diligence. Sometimes it might be better to set aside the ‘to do’ list, lose focus, not see the thing through, and wander off rather irresponsibly in another direction.

What’s your favourite film?

Fellini’s 8½. So funny, pathetic, anxious, and amorous. The dream chapter, where Guido flashes back to his childhood bedtime, is the most gorgeous sequence in cinema history.

And your favourite book?

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. But to avoid repetition (see below), I’ll say Lampedusa’s The Leopard.

Name the three people with whom you would most like to dine.

James Parker, Annabel Crabb, Jeremy Eichler. Friends all three. Brilliant writers. Great human beings. But if friends are ineligible: Hisham Matar, Adam Phillips, Helen Garner.

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

‘Metrics’. So boring. Why did we think quantifying everything and then dementedly instrumentalising those numbers would be a good idea? ‘Crumpet’. You never hear the word in the United States because no one eats crumpets. Partly, I like that it rhymes with ‘strumpet’ (which, again, no one uses).

Who is your favourite author?

Alice Munro. So seemingly artless, so deeply artistic.

And your favourite literary hero or heroine?

Augie March. Always falling under the spell of charismatic people, always falling in love, always left trying to extract himself from other people’s ‘schemes’, and always with his eye on something better, more beautiful.

Which quality do you most admire in a writer?

I love writers who carve out new possibilities for language. But I’m turned off if it starts to feel meretricious. So Chekhov, Tolstoy, Garner, and Munro are lodestars. I also love novels (Lolita, Light Years, The Moviegoer, the Outline trilogy, The Virgin Suicides) by writers who achieve energy and poignancy through original language or fastidiously controlled voice.

Which book influenced you most in your youth?

Probably Ian McEwan’s First Love, Last Rites. I see now that early McEwan’s macabre and sexual streak was probably a bit much, but it spoke to me powerfully at the time. I liked how heartfelt and open he could be when ventriloquising children. In a similar spirit (youthful sincerity in love), I adored Monkey Grip and On the Road.

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

Martin Amis. So gifted. So funny. Reading London Fields, Money, and The Moronic Inferno at college, in the company of clever people, was thrilling. But I can’t read him now without missing a sense of life not weighed down by the pressure to be clever, not reflexively italicised.

Do you have a favourite podcast?

Chat 10, Looks 3. Crabb and Sales have the podcast secret sauce. It’s a pleasure sitting in on their recorded conversations which model an authentically grown-up, caring, humour-filled friendship, and great judgement about people and books.

What, if anything, impedes your writing?

I don’t think I get enough sleep, and I watch too much soccer.

What qualities do you look for in critics?

A sense of the art form they’re writing about – and criticism itself – being embedded in life. That necessitates having a sense of humour, which makes for more pleasurable reading.

How do you find working with editors?

Fine. I feel gratitude.

What do you think of writers’ festivals?

They barely exist in the United States, so when I come home to Australia they seem wonderful, fresh, civilised. I can imagine alternative points of view.

Are artists valued in our society?

The rhetoric around ‘creativity’ as an unassailable value would suggest they are valued very highly. People go gooey around the idea of art. But that prestige doesn’t reliably translate to income for our best artists, which suggests that they are undervalued or at least that we haven’t figured out how to ‘monetise’ certain forms of creativity.

What are you working on now?

A Washington Post story about three Jackson Pollock paintings stolen from the apartment of a Harvard professor in 1973, the year the National Gallery of Australia bought Blue Poles.

Everyone gets at least one lucky break in life, or so the saying goes. For me, one of the luckiest was a childhood spent in Papua New Guinea (PNG). In 1966, my father left Melbourne for what was then the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, prompted by curiosity and the opportunity to work on kuru, a fatal neurogenerative disease affecting the Fore people of the Eastern Highlands. My mother joined him two years later, in 1968, and in PNG they remained until 1990.

My sisters and I were raised and primary schooled in Wewak, on the north coast, and at Goroka, a town nestled amid the magnificent mountains that bisect the New Guinean island. And what a childhood it was, full of marvel and magic. Sometimes I would accompany Dad on one of his medical patrols deep into the bush. During the day Dad would work, taking blood samples and following up on previous surveys, leaving me to play with the children in whichever Sepik village we were staying. In doing so he knew two things: I would be safe, and I would have fun. Now, as an adult, one of the things I most remember about those trips is the warmth and respect with which Dad and our Sepik hosts regarded one another. Though I couldn’t articulate this sense at the time, I knew that Dad trusted them implicitly and that they trusted him.

The fifteen years from the end of the World War II to 1960 were in many ways a dark period of queer history in the United Kingdom. The 1920s and 1930s were relatively relaxed in their attitudes to the gay world. As Adam de Hegedus, writing as Rodney Garland, wrote in his novel The Heart in Exile (1953), ‘the war broke down inhibitions and the element of danger made sex rampant. Public opinion was lax and the understaffed police had many other things on their minds.’

Things changed after the war. Clement Attlee’s prim Labour government (1945-51) was hardly a staunch proselytiser for gay rights. It is true that Attlee later became a founding member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, but, like most of his parliamentary colleagues, he considered homosexuality to be ‘evil’ and sponsored a bill to make anal sex illegal. It was, however, when the Tories under Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951 that queer life in London came under intense pressure. Churchill’s home secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyffe, made the persecution of homosexuals a personal quest and prosecutions increased dramatically under his watch.

We look to literary biography to understand how works of literature came into being and made their way in the world. But how much can we learn about the processes of artistic creativity from biography when the public self of the author almost completely effaces the private self of the writer: when we are left wondering how this person, of all people, could have created the works that bear their name?

Thomas Hardy’s was not an eventful life. He spent most days alone in his study with the door closed, writing in silence. As he aged, he became more reserved and increasingly obsessive about guarding his privacy, controlling his legacy, and stonewalling curious admirers. When the twenty-one-year-old Rupert Brooke met him in 1908 (Hardy was then sixty-eight), he was astonished to find not the formidable grand old man of Wessex but a man who looked like a retired country doctor and talked incessantly about the right manure for turnips.

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

A minimal version of this contract requires biographers to seek the truth and readers to take this aspiration in good faith. Of course, the ‘whole truth’ can never be told. As David Marr reminds us in this volume, ‘There can be no such thing as a definitive biography.’ Yet he and some of his co-contributors see an ethos of constrained truth-seeking as fundamental to various forms of life writing, a more inclusive and current term for the varieties of life narratives than ‘biography’. In the case of autobiography and memoir, the minimal contract can be expressed thus: ‘Writers undertake to write as truthfully as possible about themselves and their lives, and readers to read accordingly.’

In the dying days of the ignominious Conservative government that he led from 2019 to 2022, the former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson compared his fall to that of Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘It is the essence of all tragic literature,’ he claimed, ‘that the hero should be conspicuous, that he should swagger around and that some flaw should lead to a catastrophic reversal and collapse.’ Fintan O’Toole seizes on this self-serving, deluded commentary as an instance of a widespread misconception of Shakespeare’s tragic art and one that can be traced, in part, to the playing fields of Eton.

In a refreshingly brisk style, O’Toole sweeps away the clichéd definitions of tragedy that he feels have obscured the complexity of Shakespeare’s tragic art since the nineteenth century: ‘all that stuff about Tragic Heroes, Tragic Flaws, Fear and Pity, Character, and so on’. He argues that if Shakespeare’s tragedies are supposed to show us the playing out of ‘the inborn flaws of their protagonists’, then they are not actually very good. Lear might be old and foolish, but presumably (having ruled successfully for so long) he wasn’t always like that.

As I began reading Elfie Shiosaki’s Refugia, shocking reports were emerging from the Western Australian coronial inquest into the death of sixteen-year-old Cleveland Dodd in Unit 18, the youth wing of Casuarina Prison, a maximum security adult prison. Before I had finished the book, the news came through of the death of another Indigenous teenager in custody. Decades after the devastating report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, with its clear and urgent recommendations, little has been done to keep First Nations people out of custody and safe when in custody.

In 2014, while judging the Forward Prize for Poetry – one of poetry’s most prestigious awards – broadcaster and author Jeremy Paxman declared that ‘[p]oetry has connived its own irrelevance’. Paxman was talking about his desire for poetry ‘to engage with ordinary people’, to speak beyond the borders of sandstone institutions and for poets to become what Shelley called ‘the unacknowledged legislators’.

In this vein, I wonder if we might understand television – that which incorporates analogue and digital broadcasts – as a form that has connived its own irreverence. The mass influx of streaming services today has seen the rapid acceleration of a seemingly disposable ecosystem of media entertainment production and consumption. In this way, our relationship with screen-based entertainment has shifted. We consume more – possibly of a lesser quality. We no longer wait for that Thursday night in which we would join our friends in someone’s loungeroom and cheer, squeal, or cry as yet another character is killed off in Game of Thrones. Shows seem perpetually pinioned between the crisis of online spoilers and the potential for real buzz through large-scale spectacle. When we find a new show that we like, we devour it in days, not weeks. Our sacred relationship with television may have been irreconcilably altered.

Aby Warburg (1866-1929) was an influential figure in the academic development of interdisciplinary studies during the early years of the twentieth century, and Hans Hönes’s excellent new biography charts the contributions and contradictions of Warburg’s life and work. Born into an immensely rich banking family in Germany, Warburg nevertheless resisted the expectations associated with his Jewish family background and, despite his grandmother’s hope that he might become a rabbi, opted to carve out for himself a career in humanities scholarship.

The birth seasons of the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates may be one of the few details of the nominees that have escaped close scrutiny in the lead-up to November’s election. Such a neo-Hippocratic political analy-sis might also consider their general body types, genealogies, dispositions, and partners, according to the approach of a 1943 study, Lincoln-Douglas: The weather as destiny. Written by a Chicago physician and professor of pathology and bacteriology, William F. Petersen, the meteorological biography of Abraham Lincoln and his political opponent Stephen Douglas sought to make the case for the causal climatic forces on the political trajectories of its protagonists. Lincoln’s success was apparently thanks to his slender physique and ‘better equilibrium with the environment’.

At various times in its history, the Australian Labor Party’s strict insistence that its parliamentarians vote along party lines or face expulsion has caused angst within the party. On the one hand, the practice means that talented party members might be lost to the ALP; on the other, party solidarity is the key to passing legislation and to maintaining cohesion. One of the early architects of Labor’s strict party discipline was J.C. Watson, who was a major figure within the labour movement between 1890 and 1916.

Born in Chile and raised in New Zealand, John Christian Watson (1867-1941) migrated to New South Wales in 1886. Initially working as a compositor on a number of Sydney newspapers, Watson became increasingly committed to the union movement and later the Labor Party, for which he served as a Member of Parliament in New South Wales (1894-1901) and the Commonwealth (1901-10). Notably, he was the first federal leader of the ALP (1901-7) and, for nearly four months in 1904, the first Labor prime minister.

The Iranian city of Ramsar, overlooking the Caspian Sea, was the site of a meeting that brought together delegates from around the world at the beginning of 1971. The meeting was held to determine the future global management of the world’s few remaining wetlands, vital habitats for transnational migratory bird species such as Latham’s Snipe (Gallinago hardwickii), which fly annually between Australia and Japan.

Seven nations, including Australia, were signatories to the Ramsar Convention when it was first ratified in 1975, offering crucial protection to wetland areas otherwise vulnerable to infilling and urbanisation. Today, Australia hosts sixty-seven Ramsar sites, which cover almost 8.4 million hectares. The treaty holds significance for Australia on multiple fronts. It is a framework through which Australia can collaborate on the world stage, and, as Emily O’Gorman shows in her new book, it offers one definition for ‘what counts as a wetland’.

He wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.

Oblivion, Patrick Holland’s new novel, charts a course from internationalist ennui to bruised romanticism, capturing splintered souls in a fittingly elliptical fashion. It is a mood piece in the best possible sense of the term: evocative, refracted, and ambiguous. A novel about dislocation and delusion, it refuses, by design, to staidly cohere or conform. It maintains its aesthetic integrity to the end.

The publication of this book – and its reception – reveals a good deal about New Zealand as well as Australia in the past four or so decades, not least the remarkable rise of indigenous as a cultural and political keyword.

An Indigenous Ocean owes much to its canny publisher’s series BWB Texts. Billed as ‘short books on big subjects for Aotearoa New Zealand’, this series of essays is designed to provide a platform for critical discussion of important contemporary issues. History, colonisation, and indigeneity have been to the fore. Recent examples include Imagining Decolonisation; Island Time (by the author of the book being reviewed here); Introducing Te Tiriti o Waitangi; Fragments from a Contested Past; and Encounters Across Time.

What a difference a decade makes. When the second decade of the millennium opened, the United States was advocating an open door for trade and investment with China. In November 2011, President Barack Obama, in a speech to the Australian Parliament, revealed Washington’s new strategic and economic policy: the Pivot to Asia.

A month earlier, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton published an article in Foreign Affairs outlining deeper engagement with Asia. Asian markets for trade and investment were seen as a key to US economic recovery following the global financial crisis, and none more so than China. Clinton declared that the ‘region [was] eager for our leadership and our business …’ Today, of course, China is the single biggest market for every country in the region.

The claim of this well-intentioned book is to give an account of the Second Battle of Krithia, which was fought on the Gallipoli Peninsula between 6 and 8 May 1915. However, we do not reach the beginning of the battle until page 187, and it ends on page 257. Thus, we have seventy pages out of 320 on the titular topic of this book.

Nonetheless, let us not be too negative too quickly. I found the descriptions of the Krithia battle lucid and persuasive. As the author, Mat McLachlan, states, this was one of the most poorly thought-out and conducted battles in a war where such phenomena were not unknown. Anzac troops were rushed down from Anzac Cove, given the vaguest of orders as to where the Turkish enemy was to be found, and, with minimal artillery or any other support, instructed to advance and defeat them. The result was that many attacks hardly got beyond the attackers’ front line, and when they did the troops were cut down by unsubdued machine-gun and artillery fire.

In his famous outburst before the gathered men of the Symposium, Plato has Alcibiades declare that behind his ‘Silenus-like’ mask, Socrates is full of ‘divine and golden images’. He can see the gold where others see only the mask, and it is this which makes Alcibiades so desperate for the old man’s approbation. 

Alcibiades comes, like many students, to describe the way he feels for his old master as ‘love’. What he is really grappling with is something altogether more fragile: the sense of mentorship. The closeness of a teacher is sometimes more intense, and more confusing, than love. It is also a rare thing, growing rarer in proportion to the institutionalisation of education.

In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

Can mediation mean otherwise? Is there a vision of the human body within the machine that is not fetishistic compulsion, technofuturist kink, colonial yuppie wet dream? (I do not mean to impute shame or implications of abnormality to anyone’s compulsions or kinks; all of these responses, insofar as they do not turn others into resources, are potentially valid psychosexual links to a violent world.) Zones of extraction emerge: the ability to touch what is distant in time and space, yet still rendered safe by the confines of meditation. This yields an attractive value proposition for commercial forces seeking to turn material and psychic objects and rituals into commodities.

Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.

Books about Shakespeare tend, therefore, to tell us more about their authors than they do about the playwright, although they are no less valid for this. Two recent additions to the scholarly ephemera make the case that, even when we might feel a subject is exhausted, there is always something new to illuminate.

Author and literary theorist Stanley Fish is, among other things, a professor of law specialising in constitutional law, media law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that over the course of his book Law at the Movies he shows a forensic knowledge of the judicial system in the United States. This is no casual checklist of films that feature lawyers as characters, but a dissection of how particular statutes and legal procedures are represented on screen. He conveys how, in the hands of gifted filmmakers, ‘dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.

Through filmic examples, Fish poses fundamental questions. What is law? How is it established? What is the source of legal authority? What compels obedience to the law? What is the relationship between law and morality?

No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

Educated in Adelaide and at the University of Sydney before becoming national art critic for The Australian, Smee moved to the United States in 2008 to write for the Boston Globe. He is now art critic for The Washington Post. As well as books on Lucian Freud, Picasso, and Matisse, Smee is well known for The Art of Rivalry (2016), which probed the relationships between four pairs of artists: Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock, Freud and Bacon, and Degas and Monet. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his ‘vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation’. Paris in Ruins is no exception.