High-stakes soap opera

Hurricanes hardly happen, Henry Higgins assures us in My Fair Lady, Lerner and Loewe’s great musical adaptation of Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion. Obviously, Alan Jay Lerner (the lyricist), never went to Florida, where hurricanes are positively ubiquitous. The coverage in our media is immense, the footage graphic, the consequences dire.

Last months, for days on end, we read about Hurricane Milton, which terrorised the residents of Florida and caused much damage. Hurricanes clearly happen in newsrooms, too, a reliable media trope, like the Boxing Day sales or carnage at the Melbourne Cup, with footage of shoeless ‘fillies’ and inebriated Grammarians.

Natural disasters seem exclusive to the east coast of America. When did we see such breathless coverage of equally disastrous floods in Bangladesh or earthquakes in Türkiye? Much less photogenic perhaps?

Advances was struck by this as the media fixated on another American storm, the US presidential election, whose outcome will be known before this ink is dry. Never before perhaps has there been such a facile assumption that nothing matters more to Australians than the choice between Democrats and Republicans – not world politics, not the far-right parties threatening to assume power across Europe, not consequential elections in our own region, not even our own coming federal election. What consuming fun this presidential election is, a ‘high-stakes soap opera’, as someone dubbed it on ABC Radio National.

We invited nine senior contributors and commentators to reflect on the presidential election with reference to its peculiar fascination, and exceptionalism, in Australia. Their eclectic musings can be read here.

Calibre Essay Prize

Jack Hibberd’s prodigious output includes sixty plays, three novels, and four collections of poetry, including Sweet River (Wakefield, 2021), his most recent collection. This body of work does not represent his sole contribution to Australian letters and culture. He was a long-serving member of the Literature and Theatre Boards of the Australia Council, and the founding chairman of the Australian Performing Group at the Pram Factory Theatre in Melbourne.

Hibberd’s published work was augmented over the past sixty years by numerous articles in the daily press, literary magazines, and journals of opinion. An eager oenophile, his assessments of Australian wine won him an appointment as wine reviewer for The National Times.

Graduating in medicine in 1964, he worked as a general practitioner before specialising in the treatment of allergies at the Mount Waverley practice of Dr Colin Little. He distilled this experience into an inspiring guide to patient care, The Great Allergy Detective Book. Hibberd retired from practice in 2019.

A recent advertisement in The Guardian headed ‘Can’t get enough of the US election?’ prompted reflections on our seeming obsession with the current presidential campaign. Myriad readers follow the contest closely, almost compulsively. On the hour, we check the major websites for the latest polls or Trumpian excesses. In a way, the election feels more urgent, galvanising, consequential, and downright entertaining then next year’s federal election.

Is this near obsession healthy for Australian democracy? Many Australians on the left convince themselves that a Trump victory in November would be disastrous for the world order and the world economy. But will catastrophe or Armageddon follow a Trump victory? Was Australia fundamentally altered or endangered by Trump’s first presidency? If Trump is re-elected, his second term will soon be over. Said to be on the point of moral or constitutional collapse, the US republic will presumably ride on.

Sometimes the obsession with America seems reflexive. Is there a degree of titillation in this absorption? If US politics were more elevated, debate more sophisticated, the obsession would be more comprehensible.

Does this preoccupation with American politics sap our interest in world politics? Media coverage of Africa or Latin America or Indonesia, say, is negligible. In some ways, the recent Indian election was every bit as momentous as the US one, but Australians seemed largely oblivious. Far-right political parties threaten to make gains right across Europe. Should we not also focus on the strife in Sudan, Ukraine, or the Middle East? There is a forgotten pandemic raging around the world: AIDS. When did we last read about that? Homosexuality is still criminalised in many countries around the world. Women are denied education and opportunities in countries that Australia helped to destabilise. The list goes on. Why fixate on America when there is a big, complex, fascinating world out there?

What does it say about Australia – our discourse, our selective media, the health of our democracy – when we allow an almost prurient fascination with the United States to diminish our interest in the rest of the world and perhaps our own national affairs?

We put these questions to some of our most seasoned and thoughtful commentators.

‘Can't get enough of the US election?’ (The Guardian)

Clare Corbould

As leading US historian Eric Foner wrote in his classic account, The Story of American Freedom (1999), it is the ‘story of freedom’ that conveys Americans’ favourite idea of itself. Of course, its meaning and uses change over time. It is a flexible value. We only need to look at candidates’ promises in the US election, with Kamala Harris declaring, ‘We choose freedom’ and Donald Trump (‘We believe in the majesty of freedom’) planning to build ten new futuristic ‘freedom cities’.

The story of freedom has framed American goals pursued at home, often in the name of ‘democracy’, ‘freedom of speech’, or ‘liberty and justice for all’, and overseas in support of ‘democracy’ and ‘human rights’, to justify the large number of American military bases spread around the world (there are currently seven hundred, in eighty different countries).

The paradox involved in deploying police and the National Guard at home, to break up peaceful protest, and military force abroad, to impose freedom on other countries, is not often addressed, and certainly not in Nancy Pelosi’s new book, The Art of Power: My story as America’s first woman Speaker of the House. Pelosi is, above all, a patriot, fiercely loyal to her country, the Democratic party, the House, and her family. She seems taken with the idea of power as a means to freedom. Her previous book was called Know Your Power: A message to American’s daughters (2008). Pelosi has worked hard to increase the number of women with ‘a seat at the table’, but she insists that she didn’t want to be elected because she was a woman.

The first female Speaker of the House believes in employing US power in pursuit of freedom around the world. She recalls that since 1987, in the course of her long years of service in the United States Congress, she has ‘travelled to eighty-seven countries: some once, others many times, particularly to visit our troops’, whom she describes as serving in ‘the uniform of freedom’. Her starry-eyed account provides some insight into the tendency of Democrats to be more hawkish in foreign relations, more assertive in their dealings with the world, than are Republicans. Idealism begets hubris.

It is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

Brumby, as a former Victorian treasurer (1999-2007) and premier (2007-10), has had a better vantage point than most of us on what he calls the sorry history of climate policy in this country. In ‘A Personal Introduction’, which opens the book, Brumby quotes with approval Malcolm Turnbull’s accusation that too many people’s views on climate change were determined by factors other than ‘economics and engineering’. But it would be easier to agree with this proposition if you were unaware that Turnbull regards business tax cuts in much the same way. Politics and ideology can no more be removed from the one issue than the other.

Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the Greens in England and Wales, wants her country back. This has become a familiar refrain in the past decade. The success of radical-right, far-right, and hard conservative parties in increasing their vote share in Europe has alarmed many progressives. The steady support for Donald Trump in the United States, despite – or because of – attempts to undermine the democratic process and wind back the social gains of the past two generations, also revives historically inflected fears of the ultra-nationalism of the 1930s. A restorative nostalgia for a time when their nation was great, or simply better than it is now, animates all these insurgent movements from the right.

England is far from immune to these political tensions afflicting liberal democracies. The anti-immigrant riots across England in the summer of 2024 were created by the usual mix of the spread of mis- and dis-information on social media, exploited by radical-right and extreme-right actors with the simple goal of stoking the rage and division in which their support grows. A decade and a half of declining living standards, combined with a fragile economy that demands immigrant labour, on top of years of nativist politics, created an environment of civic discord. England is not a happy place.

Would it all have turned out differently had InterActiveCorp stared down the online mob? In December 2013, a public relations executive with the company, Justine Sacco, posted a joke on social media, satirising American insularity and racism. Sacco was about to board a flight to South Africa, from where her anti-apartheid family had emigrated, when she tweeted: ‘Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get Aids. Just kidding, I’m white.’ While Sacco was in the air and offline, her tweet went viral. A social media mob condemned her as a racist, established that she worked at InterActiveCorp, and pressured the company to sack her. ‘We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time,’ posted one of her critics. The company duly sacked her.

Sacco’s experience featured in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (2015), which drew attention to the brutality of the online world. Ronson had been an enthusiastic participant in social media shaming exercises, having relished the adrenaline rush and the righteous satisfaction of shaming an adversary. But having reflected on the devastating impacts of the vigilante justice that was meted out, Ronson repudiated it and devoted a book to the subject.

As is often the case with debates about cancel culture and free speech, Ronson did not interrogate the corporation that delivered the ultimate cancellation to Sacco. InterActiveCorp had a choice: it could have rejected the online mob’s demands to punish Sacco for her tweet by sacking her. It could have criticised her joke as clumsy, insensitive, and offensive. It could have explained that Sacco had intended to satirise racism and had effusively apologised once she realised how her post had been interpreted. It did none of that. Welcome to corporate cancel culture.

A book connecting Artificial Intelligence with storytelling around a Stone Age campfire certainly piqued my interest, especially given the stratospheric success of its author’s earlier works. Indeed, historian Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens (2011) was so successful that in 2019 he and his husband, Itzik Yahav, cofounded ‘Sapienship’, an initiative advocating on global challenges through focused conversations and global responsibility. In this spirit, Harari’s latest book, Nexus, focuses on the AI revolution. His Homo Deus (2015) also tackled this theme, but here Harari recapitulates ideas from both these earlier books and then develops them using an innovative framework that reviews history in terms of the impact of information networks. It is the relaying of information, says Harari, that connects Stone Age storytellers and AI.

With the development of each new information technology – from oral stories to clay tablets, from chalkboards to paper, from pamphlets to newspapers, the printing press to computers – humans have faced unexpected consequences and dilemmas. Harari aims to illustrate these dilemmas so that we, as a society, are better prepared to handle the AI revolution wisely.

Given the recent enquiry into the Robodebt scandal of 2018-19 – where flawed AI algorithms were marshalled in the hope of catching cheating welfare recipients – Australians are in no doubt about the dangers of using this technology unwisely. In Nexus, Harari gives examples such as the Iranian facial recognition surveillance system that automatically sends SMS warnings to women caught not wearing headscarves in private cars. The AI ‘sends its threatening messages within seconds’, Harari writes, ‘with no time for any human to review and authorize the procedure.’

His answer to digital overreach is to build institutions that ‘combine the powers of humans and computers to make sure that new algorithmic tools are safe and fair’. Nexus discusses many areas in need of regulation, including the now-infamous social media algorithms designed to view human users simply as ‘attention mines’. Having discussed the results of studies showing how social media has been used to undermine social cohesion in various countries, Harari writes: ‘The algorithms reduced the multifaceted range of human emotions – hate, love, outrage, joy, confusion – into a single catchall category: engagement … An hour of lies or hatred was ranked higher than ten minutes of truth or compassion …’

This is not new, but it is still startling. Then there is the Silicon Valley business model, which hacks our emotions to gain our attention and then takes our data in exchange for its services. Harari repeats a sobering story told by Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, about his meeting with Google’s Larry Page at a 2002 party. Kelly asked Page why he was bothering to create a free search engine. Page replied that Google wasn’t interested in searches; rather, ‘We’re really making an AI.’ Two decades on, we are seeing just how problematic this use of our data has become: AI has not only beaten human chess and go champions; it can also synthesise information and present it so well it is hard to tell if what we are reading, hearing or seeing is ‘real’.

In cases such as Robodebt and surveillance systems, the fault is not only with the code writers but with politicians who seek to delegate human compassion and due diligence to an algorithm. Harari goes on to suggest even more frightening possible scenarios, now that AI is capable of making its own decisions. His examples of this capability include the unprecedented game strategy mysteriously created by the algorithm that defeated the world’s go champion, and GPT-4 lying its way around the ‘are you a robot?’ guardrail used by many websites. What will happen to humans, he asks, if we are left out of the loop completely?

To answer this question, the first two parts of the book offer a sweeping view of how information networks have shaped our societies. Oral stories could unite people into tribes with shared world views, but large-scale states were not possible until information could be disseminated quickly throughout a far-flung polity. The institutions that curate this information have differed between various societies, in the weighting given to information designed to find truth compared with that used to maintain social order, and consequently, in the degree to which errors – of fact or interpretation – are corrected. The key to democracy is, Harari writes, that we can hold conversations with each other, because we have institutions that limit the power of political and corporate leaders and enforce order, but which are self-correcting because citizens have access to information and the ability to vote. Science, too, is self-correcting, through experimental replication and peer review. Harari contrasts these with, for example, centralised information systems curated by totalitarian governments whose goal is keeping order at the expense of finding facts and admitting mistakes, or religious institutions that, viewing their holy book as infallible, are unwilling to modify harmful doctrinal injunctions.

Writing rigorous, popular non-fiction is challenging, though, for writers must be selective in choosing their material. Harari says he is focusing on the problems of AI because the advantages have been spruiked enough, especially by AI’s creators. Yet so have its flaws, and many of Nexus’s examples and speculations are already well known. Still, Harari’s historical perspective is fresh, and he is adept at selecting intriguing illustrative anecdotes (although sometimes he does cherry-pick to support his arguments).

Nexus’s historical framework is built on Harari’s assertion, first presented in Sapiens, that ideas such as freedom, money, and nationhood are ‘intersubjective’ – fictions that are useful for connecting us, but which are not objective facts. Here he claims that information, too, is more about connecting us than conveying facts. This offers a stimulating historical lens, albeit a necessarily simplified one. In discussing ancient Mesopotamian data collection, for instance, or the totalitarian Qin regime’s introduction of standardised coinage, weights, and measurements, Harari explores the creation of centralised bureaucracies rather than, say, mathematics. This, in turn, affects his approach to AI. For example, he often contrasts the ‘alien’ nature of AI with our biologically rooted imaginations, but he doesn’t explore the uncanny power of mathematics to take us beyond everyday imagination, nor does he use maths to make AI more understandable. But this is not his brief: a writer of popular history must choose a viewpoint. As Harari notes, human networks are more likely to cohere around an inter-subjective construct – a religious book or national constitution, say – than a factual equation.

Harari highlights the radical difference between these earlier networks and AI-driven ones, where the power lies with a handful of under-regulated corporations, and with algorithms that can make decisions in ways that no human yet understands. He doesn’t discuss technical breakthroughs in understanding AI or new proposals for guardrails; rather, he powerfully conjures the terrifying prospect of AI run amok. He leaves no room for doubt about the apocalyptic dangers.

He does not link the problems of AI to neo-liberalism running amok; instead, he chooses fascinating historical comparisons, from misogynist curators of the Bible and print-fuelled witch-hunting outrage to ‘data colonialism’ and religious and digital mind-body splits – for Harari’s goal is to encourage readers to look more closely at what information networks can do besides simply conveying information. Then, he hopes, we can build a future in which AI’s alien intelligence helps rather than destroys us.

In November 1997, Bryce Rose was travelling for work in northern New South Wales. Rose was a technical officer with Telstra, and his help was needed in the Armidale area to address a surge in reported faults. Required to spend a few nights away from home, he arranged to share a hotel room with a colleague. On the third night, the pair went for dinner and then on to a nightclub. Much alcohol was consumed, and there was an altercation between them. Around 3 am, Rose returned to the hotel room, only to find the other man waiting for him. The furniture had been rearranged to create a space in the middle of the room. ‘Well, that’s your boxing ring if that’s what you want, mate,’ Rose’s colleague told him. There was a scuffle, and Rose began bleeding. He ultimately needed twelve stitches at the local hospital. Rose appears to have been the more innocent of the parties; his colleague was later convicted over the altercation.

This fracas at the St Kilda Hotel in Armidale might have been lost to history had Telstra not sacked Rose, who subsequently lodged an unfair dismissal claim. In a scathing decision, Iain Ross, vice president of the Industrial Tribunal, noted that Rose was off duty, not on call, and not in uniform when the incident occurred. Other than the hotelier knowing that both men worked for Telstra, there was no evident connection between the incident and Rose’s employment (the pair had a pre-existing friendship outside work).

The recent discovery of Neanderthal remains in a cave in France is timely for Rachel Kushner’s latest novel, Creation Lake, which opens with the question: ‘What is a human being?’ Timely, because this novel deals with the question in a largely archaeological manner, focusing on that nebulous point in history when Neanderthals and Homo sapiens parted ways. The former, it seems, went quietly into extinction; the latter, with their cunning intellect and knack for not knowing what is good for them, went on to create the socio-environmental mess we find ourselves in today.

The cultural image of the Neanderthal as a poorer version of humanity is being challenged; so too the idea that humans replaced Neanderthals in some linear evolutionary schema. If humans are anything, the novel’s narrator tells us, they are arrogant: ‘H. Sapiens needs help. But doesn’t want help’. This is primarily because they ‘cannot escape the chain of their telos, the sad idea that they are the logical outcome ... and that what came before must have been simple and crude’.

These ideas run parallel to Creation Lake’s main narrative, which slowly morphs into a plot about a plot to assassinate a French government sub-minister at a small country fair. Sadie Smith, our narrator, is a freelance intelligence agent hired to infiltrate a group of ecoterrorists hiding in a remote part of rural France. The premise is intriguing, and Kushner treads carefully on the dreams of the young activists: Sadie’s role is not to judge them (although she struggles with this at times) but to live among them; her mission is to discern their motivations and ideals less than their intentions. After all, there has been some serious vandalism of machinery in the area; with plans to create large plastic megabasins for irrigating monocrops, certain corporations are on edge. Enter Sadie, with her collection of boutique guns, an appetite for casual sex, and a means-justifies-the-end modus operandi. She is also exactly what we might expect from the narrator of a novel of contemporary mores: an edgy, cynical, and observant misanthrope guiding the unenlightened reader through a ‘lawless and chaotic and random’ world.

Creation Lake is too slow and cumbersome to be a thriller, too lacking in intrigue to be a spy novel. Fine, it is not really either of these anyway. It is certainly not plot-driven, which again is fine, so long as there is enough to prevent the reader skipping pages to rediscover the plotline (which I found myself doing at certain points in the novel). It is a novel in which nothing really happens, which, again, is fine; as French novelist Michel Houellebecq once wrote, ‘anything can happen in life, especially nothing’, a principle he was, however, forced to violate time and again in his novels. Kushner may secretly aspire to write like Houellebecq – indeed, he makes a brief appearance in Creation Lake under his birth name ‘Michel Thomas’ – and at times she matches the French enfant terrible’s seamless blending of information with multiple storylines and talent for knowing when to switch effectively between them.

Some sections are laboured, such as the long backstories for characters whose motivations we can discern clearly from their present situations. Kushner’s tell-not-show approach to character sometimes becomes mired in unnecessary detail. Where she is at her best is when she is hunting down analogy, and the novel is rich with these. Her definition of contemporary Europe as ‘[t]ruck ruts and panties snagged on a bush’ is just one example of this, overturning the mythic idea of a Europe ‘cherished by certain Parisians’. The ‘real’ Europe, Sadie notes, is ‘a borderless network of supply and transport. It is shrink-wrapped palettes of super-pasteurized milk or powdered Nesquick or semiconductors. The real Europe is highways and nuclear power plants. It is windowless distribution warehouses, where unseen men, Polish, Moldovan, Macedonian, back up their empty trucks and load goods that they will move through a grid called “Europe”’. Her description of the patchy hills surrounding Vandome as being like ‘the scalp of someone with an autoimmune condition’ draws a fine comparison between the degradation of the environment and the ravaging of the human immune system that increasingly resorts to attacking itself.

What makes Creation Lake thoroughly intriguing, however, is the character of Bruno Lacombe, a shadowy presence in the novel who appears only via emails hacked by Sadie. Although from the outset, Sadie is clear-headed about the phenomenon of charisma (it comes from the need to ‘believe that special people exist’), she finds herself increasingly drawn to Bruno and his philosophy. Bruno, a former May ’68er, studies Neanderthal society and culture, finding them to be the foil to the deadlock of late capitalism which has stunned Homo sapiens with its permanence. The answer? Retire to your cave, opt out, find your inner Neanderthal: ‘Revolution, which back in 1968 he had believed was possible, he now saw to be foreclosed. The world ruled by capital would not be dismantled. Instead, it had to be left behind.’ At first, this idea strikes Sadie as ‘lonely and hopeless. But maybe it is only by admitting that some harmful condition is permanent, that you begin to locate a way to escape it.’

Creation Lake reaches what can only be described as a suitable denouement. The activists, momentarily driven underground, will continue to fight the government and the corporations. Bruno sits in his dark cave contemplating the light display behind his eyelids. Sadie, shaken from her experiences, contemplates her future as an intelligence agent. There is a quiet uneasiness to all of this, which grows to dominate the novel, like ‘a Nebraskan Monsanto horizon’. What Creation Lake leaves you with is the feeling that nothing can or ever will be right again. 

Clocking in at 513 pages, Tim Winton’s new novel carries all the apparatus of a major publishing event. Juice is an ambitious work, technically very skilful, which seeks to delineate not only a dystopian prospect of the planet’s future but also an alternative, revisionist version of its historical past.

The book is set ‘at the frontier of the tropics’ in Western Australia, at a future time probably a couple of centuries hence. It starts with the unnamed narrator and a child seeking refuge in a disused mine, only to find themselves taken prisoner by a ‘bowman’, to whom our hero relates his life story. He begins by describing how he and his widowed mother eked out a frugal living as ‘homesteaders’ through local foraging and trading. In this era of climate catastrophe, when ‘the sun ate everything in sight’, it had become necessary to spend the months from October to April living underground; even in winter, it was impossible to go outside after mid-morning. ‘Winters were hot,’ recalls the narrator, but ‘summers lethal’. The remark on the second page about how the sun ‘[b]reaks free of all comparisons’ directly echoes the point Jacques Derrida made in ‘White Mythology’ about how the sun is ‘the nonmetaphorical prime mover of metaphor’. This is suggestive of the dense theoretical infrastructure that characteristically lies just below the surface of Winton’s colloquial brevity. Just as Winton’s early novel Shallows (1984) engages intertextually with Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, so Juice self-consciously addresses the subjugation of human language to environmental, ‘nonmetaphorical’ phenomena.

One of this book’s strongest aspects is its presentation of radically different annual and diurnal cycles as though they were entirely natural. Rather than the sometimes wilder hypotheses of speculative fiction, Winton’s short chapters and sentences, along with his first-person narrative and minimalist style, conjure up a world whose routines appear to be not only realistically embedded but also inevitable. This is achieved partly through a double retrospective narrative, by which the protagonist looks back on both his own life and also earlier periods such as ‘The Dirty World before the Terror’, when unspecified bad events happened. ‘As you know,’ says the narrator to the bowman, ‘that age of turmoil was universal.’ As readers we don’t ‘know’ any such thing, of course, but by this retrospective strategy Winton makes his post-apocalyptic scenario appear entirely plausible. The daily rituals of winter are recorded without any hint of melodrama: ‘We got up at two every morning. Finished our chores by five and worked on the house until the heat sent us indoors.’ The narrator also comments on how ‘folks in the olden days ... even ate birds’. Again, this time shift displaces a controversial issue of the present day into a more distant perspective, whereby we are invited to look back on these ‘olden days’ (our own time) with puzzled bewilderment.

The main trajectory of the plot involves the protagonist’s voluntary engagement with an activist organisation known simply as ‘the Service’, which educates him in history and so disturbs his stoical inclination to acquiesce in the norms of ‘realism’ and ‘common sense’ inherited from his childhood. The ‘idea that our travails were the result of others’ actions had never occurred to me’, he observes. He laments how his compatriots had been ‘convinced by propaganda that their servitude was freedom’ and thus ‘collaborated in their own entrapment’.

The bowman holding the narrator captive turns out to be a fellow ‘comrade’, another veteran of the Service, and they begin to reminisce about their earlier crusading days. Winton’s hero recalls how, after learning about ‘the empire that poisoned the air and curdled the seas’, he embarked willingly on a series of violent missions to root out the ‘bloodlines and networks’ that lingered even after the death of their nefarious empire. Oil companies and ‘faceless corporations’ are particularly in the firing line here, and human ‘objects’ are ‘acquitted’ in a ruthless, impersonal manner, with the old soldier declaring he had no compunction in dispatching ‘a man whose class and trade and prodigious inheritance had helped asphyxiate half of life on earth’. The ‘juice’ of the title is thus presented not only as a colloquial term for the energy produced by oil companies – the companies had ‘every sort of juice. The stuff that drove engines, trade, empire’ – but also the energy that drives the hero’s motivation and resilience, his ‘moral courage’, as the author described it in a recent interview. ‘It takes a lot of juice to perform,’ his fictional counterpart observes.

This James Bond aspect gives the novel pace and momentum, and it is handled well. It also introduces plot complications in relation to the hero’s own family, which are revealed as the book unfolds. But while this story is compelling in itself, the quasi-religious inclinations informing it seem more disturbing. The belief here in the sanctity of environmental activism and the evil nature of Western oil companies suggests the Manichaean consciousness that underlies this narrative, with the Service dedicating itself ‘to purify, not to conquer’. ‘Conviction’ here becomes its own justification, with the protagonist avowing, like all religious militants, that ‘our cause was just, and our faith was strong’. By comparison with, say, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140, which shows Manhattanites buoyantly raising prices for apartments on the top floors of urban skyscrapers as the floodwaters rise, Winton’s book embraces a more ascetic, humourless tone.

This quest for radical purification is reinforced not only by a mood of stern pragmatism but also by frequent references to ancient sagas, the Bible, and Shakespeare, all of which serve to integrate Juice into a literary tradition of epic conflict running back through the bellicose Viking sagas. The twin epigraphs to Juice are taken from Homer’s Iliad and a song by the Yellowjackets, as if to indicate how the author is attempting here to combine popular realism with classical myth. These mythical allusions are not intrusive or ostentatious but integrated unassumingly, as when the narrator’s girlfriend quotes (without attribution) from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale: ‘The world made by water ... Unpathed waters, undreamed shores.’ Again, there is a learned subtext here just below the narrative’s stripped-back surface.

All of this is reminiscent of Winton’s previous novel The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), which again sought to reposition the classical tradition of Western pastoral in the context of Australian realism. The abiding hazard of all pastoral is radical simplification, and this is a quality that Winton explores, for better or worse, in much of his work. Yet the unusual juxtaposition of this kind of scholarly infrastructure with a materialist ontology of objects, respecting the world as it exists prior to representation and acknowledging the inherently ambiguous status of all human stories, distinguishes Winton as an important and increasingly prominent Australian novelist on the world stage. The fact that the geographical scope of this novel extends from Western Australia as far as the Persian Gulf and ‘dune fields of ash’ in Utah makes this book more likely to resonate with a readership outside Australia, who will rightly understand it not just as a parochial tale but as a reinterpretation of the planet’s past, present, and future from an Australian vantage point.

Winton’s work going as far back as Cloudstreet (1991) has always had a sentimental aspect, and the observation here that ‘growing and feeding and blossoming and fruiting were sacred’ is the kind of observation likely to be popular among his traditional followers, as is the nostalgic tribute to ‘clean, wild, healthy things’. But one particular strength of Winton’s best work has been its openness to contradiction and alternative possibilities. The emergence in Juice’s last section of ‘sims’, hybrid simulacra blending their mechanical origins with a desire to be not ‘slave tech’ but ‘free souls’, introduces another dimension to this tale. The capacity of these hybrid creatures to tolerate heat and their lack of need for water or oxygen lead the narrator to suggest that ‘if we survive, it’ll be in co-operation with them’. While the hard-headed bowman dismisses this as ‘mad talk’, Winton’s hero eventually expresses regret at the heavy human costs of his life in service.

The protagonist describes himself as ‘a man schooled in doubleness’, and this extends beyond mere double-dealing in his personal affairs to encompass a wider sense of structural ambivalence. The narrative is interspersed with various excursions into the unconscious mind, with one rapturous dream transforming the narrator into a fish ‘swimming effortlessly’ in the sea along with ‘a million’ others, evoking an environmental idyll of collective utopia. Yet, in the final dream vision expounded in the book’s penultimate paragraph, the narrator cannot tell if ‘a constellation of hovering birds ... were there to greet me or to peck me to pieces’. It is this sense of radical openness – ‘who can tell?’– that preserves a luminous quality in Winton’s mature aesthetic. In a 2013 interview, Winton remarked that ‘fiction isn’t a means of persuasion. Fiction doesn’t have answers. It’s a means of wondering, of imagining.’ Although the way it envisages climate catastrophe is thought-provoking, it is ultimately this creative projection of ‘wondering’ and uncertainty that makes Juice a profound as well as an enthralling novel. 

Winkelmatten

A gang of cones hangs before me, long and cylindrical,
neither dark nor light – the colour of Milchkaffee.

One would overfill my palm. Last night the field
reinvented itself as one of those beds we lie down in

There must be something in the post-Brexit air encouraging British novelists to take the long view. Alan Hollinghurst’s Our Evenings joins recent doorstopper works – from Ian McEwan’s Lessons (2022) to Andrew O’Hagan’s Caledonian Road (2024) – that explore postwar Englishness from a standpoint of jaded retrospection. While they function as a kind of summation or reinforcement of their authors’ talents, they also offer a stinging critique of the nation’s propensities and historical prejudices. It is even possible to discern in the margins a note of contrition, an acknowledgment of the perspectives these writers have overlooked or neglected until now.

Our Evenings – the plaintive title seems deliberately to recall Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) – scratches Hollinghurst’s primary authorial itch: the intersection of class and sexuality. But he augments and complicates this with another marker of identity, one he has touched on but never fully explored until now: race. His protagonist is not only gay and working class, he is the product of a mixed-racial marriage between an English mother and a totally absent Burmese father. For David Win, raised entirely in the United Kingdom and given access to English public schools via a scholarship, his racial identity is something of an embarrassment, best ignored. And while his presence at school is tolerated, the question of belonging never really resolves itself. The long shadow of colonisation hangs over the novel; it folds in the bitter recriminations of the Leave vote, but it also winds its way back to Margaret Thatcher and Harold Macmillan, as if searching for the source of the rot.

‘I no longer wanted to write novels that read like novels … I wanted a form that allowed for formlessness and mess.’

Theory & Practice

How do we reconcile our ideals with the way we live our lives? What should we do when we discover that artists whom we revere turn out to be deeply flawed human beings? How do we continue to love and respect our mothers while acknowledging their shortcomings? Are desire and shame intrinsically linked? Which is the more powerful? These are some of the many issues Michelle de Kretser, twice winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award (in 2013 for Questions of Travel and in 2018 for The Life to Come) grapples with in her seventh novel, Theory & Practice.

The author has said, in an interview with Books+Publishing, that her starting point was Virginia Woolf’s (unrealised) desire to write a novel combining fiction and essays. De Kretser achieves what Woolf did not, and includes memoir as well, while pointing out that Theory & Practice is not autofiction, because it is mostly fiction, the memoir part being only a ‘splinter’. This is not the first time she has experimented with form in her novels – in Scary Monsters (2021), she (literally) turned the physical book upside down to reflect the upside-down lives of the migrants she was writing about.

Theory & Practice opens with a novel that de Kretser quickly abandons because ‘it wasn’t the book I needed to write’. The book she did need to write ‘concerned breakdowns between theory and practice’. Following short segments of essay, then memoir (in which she describes being sexually abused as a young piano student in Sri Lanka by a British examiner – one of the book’s many examples of the impact of colonialism), she begins.

The novel is set in St Kilda in 1986. Cindy, the twenty-four-year-old narrator, a recent Honours graduate in English and French, arrives in Melbourne from Sydney with a scholarship to do an MA in English. A friend, Lenny, who lectures in Art History, introduces her to bohemian St Kilda and to his circle of arty student friends. These include Kit, who is studying Mining Engineering, and his partner Olivia, who is doing Music and Law. Both have had privileged upbringings, unlike the narrator, a first-generation Sri Lankan migrant who grew up in a rented apartment in western Sydney.

Cindy’s (now ex-) boyfriend has recently cheated on her with a woman called Lois. Irrationally, she feels more hostility towards Lois than towards him, recognising that her jealousy is a ‘trite, despicable emotion … that ran counter to feminist practice’. In Melbourne, she launches into an affair with Kit, feeling nothing but scorn and pity towards Olivia, and deluding herself that she is not responsible for Olivia’s suffering. What matters, she tells herself, is ‘to be fair to myself’. As the affair progresses, she (again) experiences intense sexual jealousy, fantasising about how she might get revenge on Olivia (and failing to join the dots that she is to Olivia what Lois was to her).

This scenario allows de Kretser to explore the discrepancy between the narrator’s feminist principles and how she behaves towards other women in practice. Is it possible, she asks, for a true feminist to feel such loathing and contempt towards a (female) rival? Is sexual jealousy more powerful than female solidarity? This is part of the larger question as to how often people abandon their ideals or moral principles to self-interest. De Kretser also considers the relationship between shame and desire. Cindy is ashamed of her hostile feelings towards another woman, but unable to control them because she is overwhelmed by her desire for Kit.

Another way in which de Kretser demonstrates the gap between theory and practice is through a critique of the writing of Virginia Woolf, the narrator’s literary idol and the subject of her thesis, entitled ‘The Construction of Gender in the Late Fiction of Virginia Woolf’. Reading Woolf’s diaries, Cindy comes across a passage concerning E.W. Perera, who in 1917 came to Britain to notify authorities of atrocities being committed by the British in colonial Ceylon, his home country. Having met Perera in her home, Woolf describes him as a ‘poor little mahogany wretch’ and makes other flagrantly racist observations.

Horrified, Cindy struggles to complete her thesis as she grapples with the difference between Woolf’s public persona as a progressive, highly principled intellectual and her private racism and snobbery. This raises interesting questions about whether it is possible to love the art but loathe the artist – a timeless topic dealt with last year in Clare Dederer’s Monsters and Anna Funder’s Wifedom.

De Krester also examines the complex relationship between mothers and daughters. She has spoken about the ‘push-pull dynamic’ in mother-daughter relationships, in which a daughter needs to ‘find refuge in her mother and escape from her as well’. Throughout the novel, the voice of the narrator’s mother, who lives in Sydney, intrudes via telephone messages in which she vacillates between worrying about her daughter and making her feel guilty for abandoning her. Cindy, who feels responsible for her mother since her father’s death, struggles to break free. She also feels ashamed and embarrassed about her, especially when they mix with educated, privileged white women. In labelling Woolf the ‘Woolfmother’, de Kretser seems to suggest that the narrator needs to break free of her as well.

Early on, Cindy acknowledges that ‘I wanted to join the bourgeoise and I wanted to destroy it.’ This internal conflict recurs when she meets Kit and Olivia and realises how different their backgrounds are from her own. Despite being ideologically opposed to their privilege, she cannot help but envy the ease with which doors open for them. When she learns that Olivia’s father has secured Kit a prestigious job she observes that, ‘a pied-à-terre or a husband, either made a thoughtful gift’ – one of the novel’s best lines.

De Krester deplores the damage that an overly enthusiastic embrace of theory has wrought on the humanities. Lenny laments that ‘artists used to think about art through art. Now they think about it through Theory. What happened to praxis?’ She is particularly concerned at the over-emphasis on theory in the context of literature, portraying a deconstructionist critic as a ‘torturer’, ‘tormenting’ the text to decipher hidden meanings.

Themes of colonialism and racism in both the Sri Lankan and Australian contexts permeate Theory & Practice. In one example, towards the end of the novel, Cindy delivers a paper on Woolf in which she critiques the underlying colonialism in her late novel The Years (1937), which includes an Indian character but gives him no lines – only the white characters have speaking parts. ‘What power has a voice that isn’t heard and respected?’ de Krester asks, in an apparent reference to Australia’s failed referendum.

Theory & Practice is a slim volume at 192 pages, but the ideas contained within it are anything but modest. Michelle de Kretser has deployed fiction, essay, and memoir to powerful effect, showing without telling the ‘messy gap’ and the ‘breakdowns’ between theory and practice. 

In Richard Powers’ fifth novel, Galatea 2.2 (1995), a fictionalised version of the author ‘educates’ a computer program, named Helen, by reading it canonical literary texts – which it learns to analyse – and by telling it the story of his own life. In the celebrated The Overstory (2018), Powers explores the surprisingly broad and interconnected lives of trees and forests, and their varied significance to a cast of characters who are wedded to tree-life for reasons both personal and universal. The Overstory features a woman scientist who writes a book that inspires small and large forms of environmental activism, alongside a physically ailing and solitary tech genius who is responsible for the most popular computer game in the world. Throughout, Powers suggests that the ability to tell a ‘good story’ is essential to individual and social transformation. His more recent novel, Bewilderment (2021), focuses on a form of behavioural therapy that resembles a computer game, where participants perform cognitive tasks that can drastically modify their personalities.

All of these ingredients are prominent in Playground, with slight modifications. As with The Overstory, there is an emphasis on the majesty and mysteriousness of a subterranean natural realm, but here the world of trees becomes the world of oceans; computer games are replaced with a ‘gamified’ social media platform that predates Facebook and Twitter; and the game-based training of a human mind becomes the game-based training of AI, heralding a technological revolution that will, we are told, make humans redundant.

Evocations of artists, art history, and the art world have become a near staple of the literary novel, nationally and internationally. Local examples from the past decade include Emily Bitto’s The Strays (2014), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and Katrina Kell’s Chloé (2024). Alex Miller’s novel The Deal, his fourteenth, is the latest to probe the alluring, sometimes shady art world. It is not Miller’s first such foray; Autumn Laing (2011) was based on the machinations of the Melbourne Heide set.

The contents page states this is ‘a true story in four parts’. Naïve it might be to read ‘true’ literally, but the main character, Andy McPherson, has parallels with Miller – too numerous to list – and with select characters in earlier novels. Suffice to say, Miller knows his territory; his settings are precise, and the character of Andy convinces.

Kate Fagan is a writer, musician, and scholar whose third collection, First Light, was shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards and The Age Book of the Year Award. She is Director of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University and runs The Writing Zone, a mentoring program for emerging writers and arts workers. She also chairs the Sydney Review of Books advisory board. Her latest volume of poetry, Song in the Grass, was published by Giramondo in June 2024.

Noni Hazlehurst – actor, presenter, ambassador, director, writer, and broadcaster – has been a presence on our screens and stages since her leading role in The Sullivans in 1976. Notable works include Play School (1978-2002), Monkey Grip (1982), Fran (1985), Better Homes and Gardens (1995-2004), Every Family Has a Secret (2019-24), Nancy Wake (1987), The Shiralee (1987), Curtin (2007), and A Place to Call Home (2013-18). Her theatrical appearances have earned multiple awards and she has received several ARIA nominations for her recordings for children. We review Hazlehurst’s memoir, Dropping the Mask, in the November issue.

for Robert Gray

‘The Nazis are coming, Hurrah! Hurrah!’ wrote an excited young journalist, Ronald Selkirk Panton, to his parents the same month that Adolf Hitler was elected chancellor of Germany, the same month that Dachau was created, and the same year that the racial laws against Jews and other minority groups were enacted. Panton was one of a small but enthusiastic cohort of Australian journalists who went to Europe and filed stories about the Nazi dictatorship and the persecution of Jews. Most did not share Panton’s admiration for Hitler. Indeed, as Wilfred Burchett, one of the more political among them, later recalled, he found journalism about Hitler and Nazism elusive in Australia, amid ‘horrifying distortions’ of Hitler as a ‘man of peace’.

Fay Anderson’s new book, The Holocaust and Australian Journalism, examines the Holocaust as a subject of Australian media attention during the 1930s and 1940s, and the efforts of individual journalists and editors to bring attention to the ‘long, long story’ of twenty years of escalating persecution of the Jews in Europe. Her book is especially commendable because of her careful scrutiny of the broader Jewish history of this period in Europe and Australia, and the part played by individual journalists and editors in either assisting or combating the almost universal lack of sympathy for European Jewry in Western societies.

In this impressive, 1,000-page volume, Christopher Childers has collected almost all that remains of the highly prized verses that were written in Greek and Latin to accompany performance on the lyre. This collection of ‘lyric verse’ provides a roll-call of the greatest poetic voices to emerge in antiquity. Some names, such as Sappho, are still familiar to many today. For others, such as Ibycus, their star has unjustly fallen and the fragments that survive tantalise us with their potential.

The ancient lyre was the offspring of mischief and murder. Its origin myth begins with the precocious infant Hermes stealing the cattle of Apollo as a prank. Apollo failed to see any humour in the situation and when he discovered the child, literally red-handed, playing with the entrails of one of the cows that Hermes had decided to slaughter as a sacrifice, he advanced upon the young god fully intending to murder the babe. Infanticide was only averted when the crafty youngster, realising his dangerous predicament, offered a splendid gift to mollify and compensate Apollo. Grabbing a nearby tortoise, Hermes killed the poor animal, scooped out its insides, and then, affixing the cow guts to the outside of the shell, proceeded to strum the strings of gut. The empty tortoise shell acted as a sounding box and the plucking of the strings created such sweet notes that instantly the anger of Apollo dissipated. The lyre was born and Hermes gave Apollo the instrument to compensate him for the theft of his cattle.

Oswyn Murray’s book The Muse of History is subtitled ‘The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the present’, but this period of some three centuries represents virtually the whole of the modern historiography of Greece. The primary reason for this is one that is easily forgotten today: from the medieval to the early modern period, Greek civilisation, with its literature and art, was mainly understood from a Roman perspective. Even the gods were known by their adopted Latin names, and in an age when everyone who went to school could read and write Latin, a relatively small number were ever fluent in Greek.

The canon of Greek literature had been printed in the original very early, from the late fifteenth century onwards, and the most popular works were translated into Latin or indeed accompanied by Latin parallel texts; but far fewer were rendered into the vernacular tongues. Homer was translated into English by George Chapman from 1598, and may have been read by Shakespeare; he certainly knew the English version of Plutarch’s Lives, translated by Thomas North (from 1580) from the French of Jacques Amyot (1559-65). Thucydides was translated by Thomas Hobbes in 1628. Surprisingly, the great Greek tragedians were barely available in English at all until Robert Potter’s editions from 1777.

Resembling the memorials seen all over Australia, a slouch-hatted digger stands atop an obelisk, his hands resting on a service rifle. However, this obelisk is not made of granite or marble but a pile of books ascending skywards. The cover of Peter Stanley’s penetrating critique of Australian military history, Beyond the Broken Years, is a telling, if reductive, visual conceit, suggesting the instrumental role played by historians in placing the soldier on a pedestal.

There has been no shortage of conflicts for Australians to write about. Stanley notes that Australia is a ‘notably bellicose’ nation, with ‘a third of its first century and virtually all of its second spent at war’. In Beyond the Broken Years, he counts well over a thousand works of Australian military history. There are probably many more, depending on how one defines a notoriously hybrid genre.

What an uneven battle! Thomas Blamey, the little guy, rural-bred, rough, rumbunctious, distrusted; Douglas MacArthur, nobly bred, imperious, destined for greatness, the darling of his own heart. Roland Perry shows the true picture. MacArthur (1880-1964) was a scheming, narcissistic, lying braggard and manipulator. Blamey (1884-1951) fought to keep his Australians from fighting with the Americans, and tried, often with little effect, to influence his prime minister to act in the interests of the Australian troops and the Australian people, while displaying worrying moral failures of his own.

This is not a pretty story. In the background is a brutal war in which thousands of worthy troops, loyally believing in their respective leaders, died. The death rate at Buna and Gona, on Papua’s north coast, was vastly greater than it needed to be. The Australians lost 3,471 casualties in the long campaign, of whom 1,208 were killed. This tragedy occurred because of MacArthur’s determination to return as conqueror of the Philippines as soon as possible.

For Hannah Ferguson, the real meaning of a taboo is ‘a conversation which frays the fabric of patriarchy. A subject clouded in stigma which serves systems and institutions of power.’

Taboo is the sequel to her first book, Bite Back (2023). Both books argue that language and communication are the tools with which we can dismantle patriarchy. Bite Back considered patriarchal structures and systems in the Australian political and media landscape, particularly the Murdoch media empire. The new book turns its focus inward. Reminiscent of Clementine Ford’s Fight Like a Girl (2016) and Florence Given’s Women Don’t Owe You Pretty (2020), Taboo – part memoir, part call to arms – contemplates the body, sex, relationships, work, and friendship through a personal lens.

Ferguson is co-founder and CEO of Cheek Media Co, a digital media company that primarily shares her interpretations of news and current events via social media to an audience of 135,000 followers. As someone who has established her career online, Ferguson is aware of the restrictions that forum places on her. In Bite Back she states, ‘Our newsfeeds and our algorithms are black holes where engagement with complex topics and learning goes to die.’ In Taboo, she expresses the need to balance how funny and intelligent she is online and to maintain her ‘girl next door’ demeanour. She says, ‘I must be attractive enough to be listened to, but not too attractive or I won’t be listened to.’

A Voyage Around the Queen begins with the announcement in the London Gazette on 21 April 1926 of the birth of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, and ends with a minute-by-minute account of the goings-on in Balmoral on 8 September 2022, Elizabeth II’s last day on earth. The 650 pages in between document the main events of the queen’s life, but the book is not a biography. As with Craig Brown’s earlier Ma’am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017) and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in time (2020), what he has put together is closer to mass observation, but it might also be filed under anthropology (‘the whole institution’, said David Attenborough ‘depends on mysticism and the tribal chief in his hut’), psychology (she was ‘the Queen of the British psyche’, says Brian Masters), or even zoology (Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, and Prince Harry have each, independently, compared the royal family to pandas in captivity).

Brown’s aim is not to take apart the inner mechanisms of the queen herself – a dull woman of little imagination, limited interests, and no learning – but to lay bare her effect on her subjects. In this sense, the book is a case study of the need for monarchy. Was the queen, for example, human or superhuman? On the one hand, she was described by the Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who sat next to her at a banquet in 1956, as the ‘sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon’. On the other hand, anxiety about meeting her could cause spontaneous defecation. But the royals, Prince Harry explains in Spare (2023), are (like pandas) just as afraid of us. ‘The thing you must realise about the Royal Family is that they live in a constant state of fear … Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: OK shut it down.’

In 1983, actor Noni Hazlehurst was invited to London by Robyn Archer to be part of Archer’s new cabaret Cut and Thrust. Hazlehurst, less than a decade out of acting school and having just been fêted in Cannes for her performance of Nora in the film adaptation of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1982), was ‘thrilled to bits’.

Born at Brighton Community Hospital in August 1953, Hazlehurst was the second of George and Eileen Hazlehurst’s two children, the couple having met on the variety circuit in England. Their careers disrupted by the outbreak of World War II – George enlisted and remained in the army until well after the end of the war – George, Eileen, and their firstborn, Cameron, eventually emigrated to Australia, hoping to escape the privations and instability of postwar Britain. Being third-generation performers, Hazlehurst’s parents ‘made sure I knew how to sing, dance, play the piano, and above all, how to behave in public – how to act’.

In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

Browning is the ideal person to investigate this question, as a noted Murdoch scholar, admirer of her literary and philosophical writings, and political scientist. He states from the outset that politics, for Murdoch, ‘is not a dispensable discrete interest, but is an integral aspect of experience’. She was an inveterate crosser of borders, interested in all the arts, in philosophy, and certainly in politics. How she expressed these interests depended largely on whether she was writing fiction, poetry, plays, essays, philosophy, or letters.

There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.

How we organise such collections tells us much about how we think about the natural world and the mental structures we use to do so. A great many of these concepts, particularly that of species, have their foundations in the work of two famous men: Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-88). All students of biology have heard of Linnaeus and his conception of binomial classification, but fewer will be familiar with the contribution of the great naturalist Buffon, who dominated eighteenth-century natural science in France. In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts rectifies this imbalance, weaving a compelling and engaging narrative of these two men who never met and yet whose intertwined work laid the foundations for the study of life itself.

In 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the faintest crook of a smile.

Silvester is the godfather of Australian true crime. As a reporter for The Sun and The Age, in his work on the ‘Naked City’ column and its associated podcast, Silvester has written some five million words on the subject of crime. In Dark City, which follows Naked City (2023), Silvester has trawled through this ocean of ink to present a collection of his choicest columns, arranged thematically in sections with titles such as ‘Crooks (and the not-so-crooked)’. Naked City was prefaced with appraisals of Silvester from ‘critics’ such as Tony Mokbel (‘bald-headed alien’) and Christopher Dean Binse (‘gutter lowlife rodent’). The journalist Nick McKenzie, more generous in his assessment, notes Silvester’s ‘fair and scrupulous’ journalism, his extensive network of contacts, and his longstanding commitment to advocating for justice for the victims of crime.

It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortable crossing the frontiers of interstellar space as she is describing oystercatchers pattering feather-light in the sand.

This has been a promising year for nature writing, with James Bradley’s Deep Water showing the genre’s potential to reach back through millennia rather than through hundreds of years. Voyagers follows the slipstream of Bradley’s thought although, like the titular space probes, Fuge is quite capable of steering her own course.

Fuge has been a science writer for more than ten years, but this is her first book-length work, other than Young Adult fiction. Her 2022 essay, ‘Point of View’ (most of which is reproduced in Chapter Seven) won the Bragg Prize for Science Journalism. It also brought her international recognition when she became the first Australian writer to receive Gold at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Awards.

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

In Slick, Kurmelovs focuses on how, in the pursuit of personal enrichment, the leaders of Australia’s oil and gas businesses have put profits ahead of the environment, along with all the things the environment supports: personal well-being; the non-oil parts of the economy; and society as a whole. The ‘oilmen’ did this in full knowledge of the climatic dangers of burning petrol and gas. The science of the greenhouse effect was well understood as early as the nineteenth century, and there were a series of warnings right through the twentieth century.

Neville Wran (1926-2014) was a great Australian success story. His early childhood was spent in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, long before it was gentrified. He won a scholarship to study at the selective Fort Street Boys’ High School and then completed a law degree at Sydney University. Wran subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career as a Sydney lawyer, ultimately becoming a Queen’s Counsel (1968).

Increasingly active within the Australian Labor Party (ALP), Wran entered the New South Wales Parliament in 1970 and by 1976 had led the ALP to electoral victory after many years of Liberal rule. Presumably conscious of the recently deposed Gough Whitlam’s reputation for doing ‘too much, too soon’, Wran’s ten-year premiership was comparatively cautious and incremental, yet the Wran era boasted many achievements: generous support for national parks; increased funding for heritage and arts institutions such as regional galleries; social reforms such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality; and improvements in essential services such as health and transport.

Christians so often have problems with sex these days. Australians saw this when, during the Marriage Law Postal Survey, the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney begged them to uphold a ‘biblical definition’ of marriage – as if there were such a thing. Representatives of every denomination fret endlessly over their responsibility for enabling the sex offenders and abusers of children who were hidden in plain sight in their midst. That some do this even as they fulminate against overt sexual expression in the public sphere (the Paris Olympics opening ceremony anyone?) makes them seem even more out of touch.

Such people have come a long way from Mary Whitehouse – that grotesque, ridiculous, self-appointed ‘Archangel of Anti-Smut’ – and yet this is only because the grand old devil-dame’s reactionary Methodism fell flat even then within her ever-decreasing circle of true believers. Whitehouse’s tactics ultimately failed because most people are just not that outraged by what others get up to in consensual situations. Christian anti-sex campaigners now increasingly resort to uglier approaches, spinning ‘victim’ narratives of offence to justify their putative right to protection from blasphemy.