The lives of artists have formed a staple of art history from Vasari in the sixteenth century to Alex Danchev in the twenty-first. Current styles of art history may frown on biographies of artists. They smack too much of the hero artist and side-step the social construction of art. Yet the genre shows no sign of wilting. In our time we have such masterly works as John Richardson’s multi-volume Life of Picasso (1991–2007) and Hilary Spurling’s revelatory two volumes on Henri Matisse (1998–2005). On a different plane, Frances Spalding’s lives of Vanessa Bell (1983), Duncan Grant (1997), and the Pipers (John and Myfanwy, 2009) have done much to resuscitate their reputations. We have good lives of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, to say nothing of such massifsas the 900 pages of Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life (2011), a grim trawl through the lower depths.

It is a hot gusty day in the summer of 1958, the sort of day that melts the tar on the road and brings the red dust down from the north. In the inner-city Adelaide suburb of Norwood, Mario Feleppa, twenty-eight and not long arrived in Australia, is fed up. Not with the heat – he is used to heat back in Italy – but with horses. Specifically, the horses that are stabled – surely illegally – in the vacant block next door. The stink of dung is ever-present, as are the swarms of flies attracted to it, and they can kick the dividing tin fence until it drives a person mad. Pia, his wife, is pregnant with their first child. Despite the heat, she stays indoors with the windows tightly shut against the smell, the flies, the noise. It is so bad that they can’t sit outside at night or invite friends over, and Mario is sure the indoor confinement is not doing Pia any good. He has found out the name of the owner of the block and has complained to the council, not once but several times. No action has been taken. On the Italian grapevine that flourishes in the back streets and market gardens of Norwood, he hears that the owner and the Clerk of Council are friends; in Mario’s experience this means that no action will ever be taken. He had thought that Australia would be different, but it seems that it is just the same as in Italy. Rules and by-laws are only for little people.

‘What is chaos?’ asks the unnerving child at the centre of J.M. Coetzee’s new parable-novel, The Childhood of Jesus. ‘I told you the other day,’ replies the child’s guardian. ‘Chaos is when there is no order, no laws to hold on to. Chaos is just things whirling around.’

Louise Erdrich’s The Round House begins with a lyrical intimation of chaos, of nature whirling, malevolently. ‘Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation,’ writes Joe Coutts, the novel’s narrator-in-retrospect. Ash shoots, elm, maple, box elder, and catalpa have burrowed into the fabric of the North Dakota home, rendering it vulnerable. To Joe, even at thirteen, ‘it seemed increasingly important … that each one of these invaders be removed down to the very tip of the root, where all the vital growth was concentrated’. While Joe is prising out these vegetable invaders, a white man has raped Joe’s mother, Geraldine, somewhere on the reservation, in a place sacred to their Ojibwe people.

As writers, Coetzee and Erdrich could hardly be more different, out of different worlds, different crucibles – white South Africa and Native America. In style they are distinct – Coetzee so spare, allusive (and elusive), Erdrich discursive, seemingly straightforward. But both use their diverse fictional forms to shape experience – some of it their own – into profound, often devastating interrogations of human behaviour and moral understanding. They have irony in common and wit to spare – the latter often robust in its earthiness. The authors offer no easy truths and little consolation, and yet they nourish. It was sheer accident that I came to read them in tandem, but the exercise was bracing and illuminating. As writers they complement one another – ground bass to melody – alternating parts. And like the lawyer–writer Bernhard Schlink (notably in The Reader, his famously controversial 1995 novel about guilt and the Holocaust), they confront the Janus face of the law as we humans devise it: to create order and to liberate, but also to bind and confound.

The Childhood of Jesus announces its scope with its provocative title. The work, freighted with scriptural reference, is tantalising in its layers of meaning, its oblique references. The child is called David (Jesus, son of?). When we meet him, at the gate of a resettlement place called Novilla, he is in the care of a man named Simón, his accidental guardian. Together they have come from a camp, Belstar. Man and boy are refugees, human jetsam, subject to all the indignities we routinely inflict on people who are displaced. Simón and David struggle with the language (Spanish). They have no food, no shelter. When they go to the building nominated by an official, the key to their allotted room can’t be found. Simón asks, ‘“Do you not have a – what do you call it? – a llave universal to open our room?” “Llave maestra” the woman corrects. “There is no such thing as a llave universal. If we had a llave universal all our troubles would be over.’”

There is no universal key to unlock the mysteries of Coetzee’s narrative. One wouldn’t expect there to be from this most contained, enamelled, concrete, and surreal of writers. So one reads on, beguiled by the vivid moment, things that are what they are – a day’s work, a shared meal, a child’s delighted reading of Don Quixote – while simultaneously puzzling over the infinite regresses of meaning and reference, over what words, names, relationships betoken, in this work and throughout Coetzee’s fiction and autobiographical oeuvre. This is both new ground and echo chamber.

In The Childhood of Jesus, troubles are never over. When Simón selects Inés, a woman he has seen only once, to become David’s devoted mother, the ‘family’ does not settle into a loving union. Inés is suffocatingly protective. David – who she insists is exceptional, – is unreceptive. ‘I haven’t got a mother and I haven’t got a father. I just am,’ he declares. On the blackboard of the school he hates, before a teacher he loftily disregards, he writes ‘I am the truth.’ At other times he is a mere needy child. He ‘whines’, or asks a litany of questions that disconcert his protector Simón.

Simón, endlessly patient, wryly philosophical, is the reflective soul of the narrative, its fallible moral sounding board – and the flesh-and-blood human who engages one’s sympathy throughout. In the bland (brave?) new world he has entered with the child, he is the one character with a past. Challenged to adapt, he counters that he is not nostalgic; he clings not to memories but ‘the feel of residence in a body with a past, a body soaked in its past’. In the present, Simón drives that body to provide a subsistence for the child, and later the mother. We feel the hammer of his heart as he toils each day as a stevedore, the strain as he hoists sack after sack of grain onto his back and staggers up a gangplank. He is ‘starved of beauty’. Lectured by Eugenio, one of his oddly theoretical fellow labourers, about sexual urges and the folly of accepting the inferior copy of the ideal, he ‘tries to imagine Eugenio, this earnest young man with his owlish glasses, in the arms of an inferior copy’. Such small explosions of irony, when they come, are as welcome as rain on bush litter. The many-faceted Coetzee is never predictable, perhaps even to himself. The Childhood of Jesus is a profound meditation on one of the moral blights of our times, the treatment of refugees. But Coetzee has never been a polemicist, and this work does not preach. Rather, it instantiates. It also plays – with ideas, with symbols, with reverberations from Coetzee’s earlier writing – and it intrigues, leaving the reader forever guessing.

Louise Erdrich also mines her territory. Some of The Round House’s Ojibwe characters have appeared before, in her award-winning novel, The Plague of Doves (2008). Judge Antone Bazil Coutts reappears here, husband to Geraldine, the woman who fails to return home in the usual way on the day that father and son are rooting out the invading trees. And Mooshum, the irrepressibly sexual grandfather, reappears to tell Joe tribal tales of the origins of evil, of the spirit, the ‘wiindigoo’ that can possess people, and make them treat fellow humans as prey.

Louise ErdrichGeraldine Coutts, like her judge husband, is a tribal official, an enrolment officer, and head of a department. She might work on a Sunday, but her rhythms are familial, predictable. In the intimacy of this close family and in the tissue of the interconnected tribe, the woman is pivotal. ‘Mom would have returned by now to start dinner. We both knew that,’ writes Joe. ‘Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs.’ When Geraldine Coutts does not appear, ‘her absence stopped time’.

The rape almost breaks the family. For a long time Geraldine Coutts withdraws, bodily and emotionally, into her room, leaving her men initially bewildered, then desperate in their pursuit of justice – or vengeance. Joe might be reading the law books in his father’s study, including ‘The Bible. Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law’, but he also has recourse to other imperatives, to the laws implicit in his grandfather’s retelling of tribal myths.

But Erdrich’s novel is not a reform pamphlet. Issues emerge so naturally from the sprawl of her narrative that you scarcely see them coming before they are upon you, shocking in their consequences. Much of the novel is a boy’s story, told by the man, the legal prosecutor Joe becomes, but still with a boy’s freshness and naïve precocity. It is a Bildungsroman,with Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird the obvious antecedents. Joe and his close companions do what all boys do, and what Native American boys on a reservation do in particular. They ride, swim, boast, flirt, compete, and observe as their elders mingle, support, love, and betray one another. They experiment with alcohol and sex. They learn, imperfectly, sometimes too late. They absorb the norms and the aberrations of their own culture, and of the white culture, the white law that is always there, impinging, enticing. They belong to families that are complex, exemplary, and dysfunctional. They live in the late twentieth century (the novel opens in the summer of 1988). They embrace aspects of Christianity while being the inheritors of tribal history and custom. They ride old bikes and have race memories of buffalo.

Their women, as Joe records so movingly, are at the heart of their families, their society. Native women are also raped, in horrifying numbers – one in three according to Amnesty International figures, and eighty-six per cent of them by non-Native men. The tangle of jurisdictions means that many of the offenders are never prosecuted. But one learns all this only gradually as the novel unfolds. Erdrich has every great storyteller’s ability to lure one on, to embody the abstracts of justice and moral complexity in the everyday actions and motivations of men, women, and children.

These two works, so divergent in style and their ways of taking on the world, share a plangency that haunts one’s mind. Like the opening phrase of some Beethoven sonatas, they won’t leave one alone. Perhaps it is the immediacy of their language, their perfectly tuned dialogue that cuts into consciousness. Perhaps, in Coetzee, it is a restrained wisdom, and in Erdrich a related faithfulness to her characters, in all their knots and moral confusion. Or perhaps, in both of them, it is a goodness, to which they would not lay claim, finding profound expression in art.

Prophecy

cliffs ahead the singing ravine
a horse gallops beside the train never tiring
who is stoking the engine? is the lion tame?
the thorn in the paw was a dream
everything ran on grease and sequins
everybody wore a smoking hand
when Habakkuk rode into the desert
with the lighter and a wafered tongue
a trail of bunting flicks and frets
like a projectionist with a stammer
there was never a bridge the horse the horse
every boom gate is a gallows
the spitfire diving for the dining car
will the yogi come out of his trance?
the jewel on his turban charging the ape
with coveting another man’s wife
the ostrich’s light globe head has blown
red beads across the carriage floor
a flapper girl tied to the tracks ahead
every hoof print the shape of ‘you’
as the standoff continues upon the roof
three winds come clapping for hats
and it burns burns burns the ring of fire
there was never a bridge to be out

*

Habakkuk rides the wincing mule
as if it matters how you travel to your funeral
everything is melting down to murder
the mirage is a cake of trouble
the Russian who said only blood will tell
the sun’s throwing knives never miss
may the dust he returns to catch the light
who has eaten his death cap mushrooms?
the mule knows the dangling carrot is a boot
the mule knows how things go around
how summer reacquaints us with our ugly feet
how Bertha pole dances in a caravan
animals in costumes dream of new costumes
Habakkuk rides like prophecy
his sentence dangling around his neck
rabbits knocking on wood in the cemetery
a tongue that tastes like the body of Christ
the mirage is still a cake
sometimes he hears the squeak of trees
but that must have been days ago
as somebody somewhere plays guitar
and chuckles like firewood
the bearded lady or the ringleader’s wife
he should have chosen the other hand

*

it’s not the storm it’s the debris that kills you
in a hot chilli hallucination
eye floaters steering the eye of the film
avoid contact with the air as much as possible
people’s views aside for a moment
they’re calling it terminal
white goats swimming in a pool of milk
dogs nailed to the ground by thunder
the standoff continues upon the roof
and smoke in the projector’s beam
how to turn away from a beautiful woman
duelling with snarls and squints
the hobbled heart and violent mind
the eagle in the baby pram
the gun he draws becomes a banana
only the lighthouse keeper knows
the extraordinary life she lives without him
if they’d only invested in spray on skin
the ape and the mushrooms come to pass
the abuse of prophecy and group hypnosis
when the only choice is how to fall
down on Habakkuk in the canyon
like a ceiling rose with a beautiful voice
about the horse about ramraid mayhem

Nathan Curnow

Big Wig

You were no famous footballer, nor footballer’s hungry wife.
You lived in the suburbs and read, cool-eyed,
of proliferating celebrity cells.
Even so, you had your own cellular time in the sun.
You married Fantasy Island style on Fiji.
A dwarf sang ‘Sailing’ on the ukulele
as you arrived in a golf buggy,
hair blown across your eyes like multiple horizons …
My brother, proud and plump,
in ill-fitting sarong and shirt.

We had swallowed worse things than cancer’s horse pills:
the jazzy optimism of recovery statistics,
talk of the glorious sunset of remission,
the onset of broccoli-tufted hair
(our very own Jean Seberg!)
roaring you back to life
like a biblical wind in the garden.
Your new wig was pure Get Smart,
triple negative concealed.
But white-coated oncology
clashed with your bobbed homage,
the drugs only stylish to a point.
You left them behind with admirable tact.

And when the white coats looked away,
your cells grew wings
and flew you close to the sun.
We dealt with this wax-winged cliché,
chemo’s flaring, heartless conceits.
After a week the sun rolled over and turned its back,
so that the days became lightless,
faster than time. Our big familial bang –
no mere problem of science.

At the end, the sun relented,
sat poised on your bed in the middle of the night.
Its last offer: an endless chemical dawn,
your chauffeur, a morphine driver,
blurring the sounds of your children
playing in the white halls.
I’ll take it, you said.

Eventually we opened our eyes to the glare;
to an untimely pyre.
The whole family, afflicted by a kind of singeing –
like a perm gone badly wrong.
We seemed to sway as one
in breezeless, overbright corridors,
mopping heat from your limbs as if you were a saint.
Until the day came when Mary Magdalen
gestures fell hopelessly away,
and the wig was hidden quietly in a drawer.
We leant once more into strange, free air –
beyond the Fijian heat of hospital ward.
One of us, new to it, learnt how to take rings from
your cold young fingers in the morgue,
to order triangulated flower arrangements,
carnations packed in like tissues.

The pretty wig is in the wardrobe now
hanging limp after dial-a-blessing
from the Buddhist monk;
he and Shirley Bassey chanting low then loud
against the morphine’s dull lapping.
Afterwards (what kind of marker is that?)
we muttered prayers for you in a no-name park,
looking around feebly, like demented aristocrats
awaiting our own drivers
to rescue us from bloodless revolutions such as these.

Weeks on, your credit card purchases roll in,
sweetly, exorbitantly.
The new couch, smart yellow blinds,
designer chairs, sheets and towels –
a kind of second nesting
for those dear ones used to curling
about your knees like butter.

On Thursday, an expensive auburn wig
arrives in a post pack from Hong Kong.
I am fretting, feeding your children indiscriminately,
excessively.
I know nothing of Grace’s allergies.
and cannot stop this itching.
I need to speak with you, I say.
My brother, in the lemon-coloured kitchen, does not hear,
reading the bill in a halo of morning light
as if it is a love letter.

A. Frances Johnson

Four Sonnets

The Drowning of Charles Kruger, Fireman
(St Valentine’s Day, 1908)

Comes a fire into Canal Street:
its rows of clapboard tenements rotting back
to marsh. He knows it too well, the ‘furniture
district’. This time, a fire built on picture frames.
Charles Kruger drops onto what he thought
a cellar floor, finding instead his New World to be
eight feet of seepage bound by stone. He kicks
back to smoky air. From above come voices.
Lanterns play upon the shifting surface, sending
wobblings of light across the walls (ectoplasm
of his own trembling device) – the ghost of him
seeking release. He gives it up. Warbles out
his love. He takes the eager water: a brief
consummation made of thrashing arms.

Gustav Mahler in New York (1908)

It is the bass drum which has summoned him.
The dull collisions of felted wool against calf­
skin. The end of everything, he knows, these
muted thuds.
The Mahlers have taken an
eleventh-floor suite (there are two grand pianos),
at the Hotel Majesticon Central Park West.
He joins Alma at the window. Directly below,
is the halted cortège of Charles Kruger.
Once more, the tufted mallet meets the drum­
head. He sees the tight-packed waves speed
upwards, rattle through the window and collide
with his chest. He recoils. Curves his body at
the waist. A bow (conductor to his audience),
only contorted thus, gasping for air.

Mahler at Toblach (1910)

Madness, seize me and destroy me,
he scrawls across the staves. To the movement
(purgatorio)he adds a final, isolated note. Marks
it thus – ‘completely muffled drum’. At which
the four-paned windows of the häuschen burst
apart and the room fills with grey feathers.
He rises, choking. A storm of plumaged air
beating at his face. Then gone. He gathers up
the sketches from the floor. The young architect
has declared his love – (misaddressing it, he
claims, to Herr Direktor Mahler). My Almschili
he scrawls, You are not ashamed, it is I who am.
Alas, I still love you.Who finds his mouth
crammed full with soaked grey feathers.

Epilogue (1911)

Back in New York the throat infection re-
occurs. He conducts Busoni’s Berceuse
Élégiaque and returns to Europe.
Bacteria now gather at the lesioned heart.
‘My Almachi’, he cries again (again). At some
point the kidneys fail. Black water seeps into
his lungs. He drowns by tiny increments –
the death mask imparts a serenity
not on display during his final hours.

He has entrusted his sketches of the
Tenth to Alma. In the salon she tears
the most damning scrawl from the manuscript.
Carries it to the fire. Sets it to flame.

John A. Scott

procedures in aesthetics

Click here to read the poem

Dan Disney

Bushfire Approaching

I

I am ready to evacuate if need be.
My wife emailed to say a fire is out of control
on Julimar Road, less than ten kilometres away.
She says she’ll return with the car, but I say it’s okay,
we’ll monitor and speak through the gaps.
She insists she will return: listening to the chat
in the library at Toodyay, seeing smoke in the west,
checking the FESA site. I say I will take a look outside
and get back to her in minutes. She is waiting. I climb
the block gingerly with my torn calf muscle striking back,
and see the growing pall over Julimar. A great firebreak
and a bitumen road are between here and there, I reassure,
though I will keep a close eye on it. The breeze blows
from the east, but is ambivalent and could swing
about. There are no semantics in this. And Paul Auster
is right where William (the lumberman) Bronk was wrong:
the poem doesn’t happen in words, but ‘between seeing
the thing and making it into a word’. Location location location.
As evidence: if fire sweeps through, only the mangled
metal of this Hermes typewriter will remain,
a witness, philosophy in-situ vanquished, and an elegy
made from bits of a different seeing with different words,
remain. Figurative density will take hold, and landscape
will be less fragile, the font more robust. It won’t rely
on paper: ash become an idea, a taste for some.
You stop seeing the red when it’s on top of you.
But true burning feeds on ash and the idea
of fire: it perseveres and requires only oxygen
and memory. Wild oats caught in my socks
taunt my ankles. Fuel for fire. In all seriousness.

II

I am not hearing AC/DC’s ‘This House is on Fire’
out of perversity. This morning a rush of colour
brought on a flashback, and I’ve not had one of those
for a decade. Strychnine-saturated, like the bush
where rangers claim to conserve native species
through poisoned baits. Rapid heartbeat, dry mouth,
outbreaks of laughter (grotesque, face of death),
colour codings of annihilation: spiritual and topographical.
Phantasm of acid trips – pink batts, supermen, green dragons,
orange barrels, purple hearts, clearlights, ceramic squares,
goldflakes, microdots, lightning bolts: nomenclature
of William Blake and weird melancholy of habitat loss.
Lost and unfounded. A run on images. Voices in the room.
Excruciating paranoid cartoon violence. So, I check
outside again and the plume is still moving southwest
though the wind is tentative and temperature
up five degrees over the last thirty minutes. This is realtime,
unlike hypnogogia, hallucinations? Grounds for worship.
Foundational ontology. I should mention that I have flu
and that’s why I stayed home in the first place. Harvest
is full-on though I have finished grass cutting here.
I wore myself out and my defences are down. Run down.
Antibodies hesitant if not docile. I make rhetoric
out of the flood of image-fragments: seems like good sense,
making the best, keeping a grip, cool in a volatile situation?

III

I’m abandoning my poem on the wheatbelt stone gecko
and the ‘keeled tail’ of a black-headed monitor
which is running amok through the roof, along walls,
scaling trees with maritime skill. The images lack
explanation and coalesce, are minimalist, but will
serve as a poor kind of last will and testament.
One sheet in my pocket, and it will be this.

IV

The wind has dropped, though smoke – not impenetrable
but more substantial than ‘thin’ – hangs over the block,
a tentative fallout. The birds are doing their silence
thing, or have shot through. We keep no birds in coops.
The air is almost acrid. Defend or abandon?
It’s when the smell of burning reaches upwind
that you know it has bitten deep. Firebreaks: check.
Water: check, but if the pump goes that’s an end to flow.
Fireblanket: check. Personal papers and evacuation pack: check.
No room for ‘literature’: just this poem, paperweight.
Ready to lend a helping hand: always, to best of ability.
Essential medications. Maybe the boy’s most precious toy,
but he wouldn’t expect it. Something of my wife’s.
Insects thick on the flyscreens: suddenly Hitchcockian.

V

Smoke-mushrooms are haloes about wattles they haven’t yet touched
where it counts. Prelude. Early life of devastation, its long legacy
too long in its brief moment of, well, beauty. Back again after
staggering uphill – glimpses of lush green moss amidst stubble
and granite are bemusing and bizarrely cheering – and all is suddenly
military, warzone, combat. Helitacs, fixed-winged water bombers
coming over the hills. Dousing. Or maybe it’s anti-militaristic?
No time to think about this. Three years ago, fire destroyed
forty homes just south of here. It was like this then, too.

VI

Alert Level: ‘a bushfire is burning near Julimar and Kane Roads’;
‘stay alert and monitor your surroundings’; why use quote marks?
This is barely copyright in the life and death of it. Plagiarism?
Blame burns with a heat unlike any other and burns long
after last embers have faded. And with days of heat and high
winds ahead, even a dead ember might find heart again, and leap
to the occasion. Elemental showdown. Proof. Precedent.
Test case. Habeas corpus – the body present. The burning
question: people build houses in the bush, then blame the bush.
My brother, life-long surfer, says: If I get taken by a shark
remember it was while doing something I love in its universe.
Remember me in this light. The fire has jumped Julimar Road.

John Kinsella

‘No’ is not part of modern consumer life. ‘Yes’ is the catchcry of the market. Despite the best efforts of scientists and activists, it may be too late to phase out fossil fuels and find alternatives to the mass consumerism that is so dependent on them. Human-induced global warming’s tipping point is nigh. There is almost no turning back. Geo-engineering – climate engineering – has appeared as a magic weapon in the battle against climate change and global warming so that business can continue as usual.

I am surprised this book doesn’t come in plain packaging. Its title was inspired, after all, by a cigarette – Belomorkanal, also known as Belomor, a Russian brand the author describes as ‘strong, mood-altering cigarettes’. This cigarette motif suggests the lost world of Europe, when the Iron Curtain still hung.

Obama’s second term

Dear Editor,

After admiring Morag Fraser’s perceptive and insightful review of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln (February 2013), her commentary on Obama’s second term is sadly superficial and contains several inaccuracies, some quite bizarre.

First, she says that Romney’s defeat was patently obvious. (‘The mystery is why so many people didn’t see it coming.’) I spent election week in the United States, and election night in Boston with Obama campaign supporters who remained nervous that their man would lose until close to midnight. No major opinion polls nor the many insiders to whom I spoke predicted the result with confidence. The Electoral College result belies the close popular vote. Had a mere 300,000 votes (0.2 per cent of eligible voters) voted differently in only four states, the Electoral College result would have reversed. ‘Too close to call’ was the right call in this election.

We give you ABR Online!

By now readers will have heard the whispers about our new website, the unveiling of which is imminent. Our electronic home will be much easier to use and more pleasant to read. We want to make the experience of browsing through ABR Online as close as possible to flipping through the magazine in a bookshop or library. Tablet and smartphone users will also notice that articles now integrate smoothly with their device and use less data.

The website is so important for exposing this country’s literature and writing world-wide which is why we are now offering ABR Online to all of our current print subscribers free of charge. To sign up and join the literary discussion all you have to do is subscribe here or call us on (03) 9699 8822. It’s a simple process – don’t miss out.

Intensive work on the new website is continuing. We expect to go live in the middle of March. Please be patient as this transition takes place, and email us with any problems, feedback, or suggestions.

Ruth Starke on Don Dunstan

We are delighted to be able to publish Ruth Starke’s detailed and probing article on Don Dunstan, the legendary South Australian premier. Dunstan, widely regarded as one of Australia’s outstanding reforming political leaders, continues to fascinate and intrigue. Flinders University – where Ruth Starke has taught for several years – is the repository of the Dunstan collection, and Dr Starke is one of the first people to explore it in earnest. Her article (one of the longest ever published in ABR) is based on extensive research, new interviews with senior associates of Dunstan (including Mike Rann, another former premier), and a nuanced understanding of this mercurial leader, who transformed, and unsettled, South Australia over two decades.

Ruth Starke in the Dunstan Collection, Flinders University library

Ruth Starke, who is preparing an edition of Dunstan’s letters, researched and wrote ‘Media Don’ in her capacity as the fifth ABR Patrons’ Fellow. The Fellowships, of which we have now offered eight, are intended to reward fine writers, to broaden the magazine, and offer our readers searching articles on significant literary, cultural, or political issues and personalities. We look forward to publishing many more articles of this scope and ambition in coming years.

Dunstan devotees won’t want to miss the March ‘Friday at the Library’ at Flinders University on 15 March, when Ruth Starke will be in conversation with Kerryn Goldsworthy, who herself wrote so absorbingly about Dunstan in her book Adelaide (2011). See the advertisement on page 37for more details.

Enter the Jolley Prize

Exponents of short fiction have until 31 May to enter the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. The three prizes are worth a total of $8000, including $5000 for the overall winner. Past winner Maria Takolander will judge the Jolley with noted author–academic Tony Birch and writer Terri-ann White, who is also Director of UWA Publishing. The three shortlisted stories will be published later this year, and the winner will be announced at a Sydney event in September or October.

Entry forms are available online or from ABR: (03) 9699 8822. To encourage subscribers to enter the Jolley Prize, we have reduced the entry fee for them to $10. Multiple entries are welcome. A separate entry form (one accompanies this issue) is needed for each story, but please note that you can send us a single cheque.

ABR warmly acknowledges the continuing support of Mr Ian Dickson.

Porter Prize

Of the nearly 800 entries submitted in this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the judges – Bronwyn Lea and David McCooey (ABR’s Poetry Editor) – have shortlisted five poems. We hope you enjoy reading them. Dan Disney’s extraordinary poem ‘Procedures in Aesthetics’, readers will not be surprised to learn, took ABR to new heights and angles.

This year, instead of simply naming the winner in the April issue, we will celebrate our five poets and the Porter Prize that facilitates hundreds of new poems each year at a special ceremony on Wednesday, 27 March at Boyd. Jane Porter (the poet’s daughter) will announce the winner, who will receive $4000. This event starts at 6 p.m. Reservations are essential: (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Giveaways galore

This month, courtesy of Allen & Unwin, ten prompt new subscribers will each receive a copy of The 2013 Voiceless Anthology, which Alex O’Brien reviews for us in this issue.

Thanks to Universal Pictures, twenty-five renewing subscribers will win a double pass to see the new movie adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations, which opens in Australia on 7 March.

Why do you write?

How vast the world’s scale is; what splendour it holds. Is it not our task to respond to it, to answer it, to make designs and patterns of our own? We live so briefly, from one night to another – and, in our life, such light. It passes through us, it gives us the gleam in our words: to write is to make a mirror.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

No.

Two photographs from the present book, caught by the British press in 2009, vividly testify both to the fun and to the difficulty of maintaining ancient ritual in the modern world. In the first, a widely grinning Prince Harry, one leg extended in parody of traditional marching style, with an equally mirthful Kate Middleton by his side, stands amidst a crowd of onlookers gleefully watching Prince William (in the second image) – festooned with lanyards and ribbons, ostrich and heron feathers sprouting from his velvet bonnet, biting his lip with fierce concentration – as he struggles to retain composure while processing with other befeathered Companions of the Order of the Garter from the keep of Windsor Castle to St George’s Chapel. Even for the Royals themselves, whose interests are so deeply invested in this annual ceremony, it is evidently hard to regard the occasion with complete solemnity. ‘Rationally it’s lunatic,’ the Duke of Edinburgh has observed, ‘but in practice everyone enjoys it, I think.’

In Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, the hero Robert Jordan, an American fighting on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, receives some advice from Karkov, a Russian ‘journalist’ at the unofficial Soviet headquarters in Madrid.

Jordan has been pressing Karkov on whether the Soviets consider the assassination of political opponents a legitimate technique. Musing ironically on the show trials of Stalin’s rivals then under way in Moscow, Karkov parodies the rhetoric used by prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky: the accused are ‘the dregs of humanity … we execute and destroy such veritable fiends … These are destroyed. They are not assassinated. You see the difference?’

Did you know that the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from space; or that Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3) came from India; or that Descartes thought up letters (a, b, c, and x) for use in algebra; or that William Bateson coined the word ‘genetics’? Did you know that there are five million trillion trillion bacteria on earth – give or take a few?Every few pages William Bynum gives you a choice factoid that’s Quite Interesting – as long as you remember to write it down straight away before it fades. Reading this Little History right through is like sitting in a Chinese restaurant with one of those long menus and ordering a portion of everything listed. Quite soon discrimination fades and the march of history seems relentless.

When sixteen-year-old Kenno and his family are evicted from their coastal rental property, Kenno is unconcerned: he has a cunning plan that will give them enough money to purchase his dream home. The idea involves lodging a compensatory claim for an accident that happened years ago. But Kenno needs his older sister, Lou, to fill in the details. She has a welted and bluish scar on her forehead, a physical reminder of what happened, whereas Kenno’s memories are less vivid. The results of this freak incident, however, are manifested in Kenno’s father’s crippling dipsomania and his mother’s reliance on religious salvation.

If you are a new arrival, welcome to Australia. You will be living in a country that is stable, prosperous and democratic. You will also be joining a culturally diverse but cohesive society made up of Australians of many backgrounds, united by shared values and responsibilities.

I have beliefs about what you believe. I also have beliefs about what I myself believe. The big difference between the two cases is how I come by these beliefs. By and large, my beliefs about what you believe come from observations of your behaviour (understood in a wide sense, which includes the environment in which your behaviour is located). Here are two illustrations. You sell all your shares and buy gold. I infer that you believe that gold will outperform shares. You write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election. I infer that you believe that the Coalition will win the next election. However, my beliefs about what I myself believe don’t usually come from observations by me of my own behaviour. My belief that gold will outperform shares may explain why I sell all my shares and buy gold, but it doesn’t reveal to me that I have this belief. Likewise, I don’t need to write an article saying that the Coalition will win the next election in order to discover that I have this belief. There is, to borrow some jargon, a first person–third person asymmetry in how we arrive at beliefs about beliefs.

In Speaking Secrets, academic and journalist Sue Joseph looks at what happens when sex becomes ‘public property’, and interviews a range of Australians who have had often traumatic sex and sexuality-related experiences aired to a wide audience through the media. Some of her interviewees are well known, others are not. Several discuss their experience of sexual abuse, either as a victim or as the relative of a victim. There is an interview with David Cunningham, the Greens candidate who has argued that ‘disabled people need sex lives’. Cunningham (who has cerebral palsy) has stated that people with disabilities should have access to sex workers. There are interviews with the transgender lawyer Rachael Wallbank and the Reverend Dorothy McRae-McMahon, a Uniting Church minister who came out as a lesbian in 1997. In one amusing moment, McRae-McMahon finds herself discussing anal sex during her conversation with Joseph in a Sydney café.Speaking Secrets is situated in the field of literary journalism. Reading Joseph’s evocative prose, the reader almost feels as if he is eavesdropping on the interviews. Still, the author leaves much to the imagination (I will discuss one instance of this). There is not a cliché or a superfluous word in the book.

Lime Green Chair, which is Chris Andrews’s second book, won in manuscript form the Anthony Hecht 2011 Poetry Prize. Andrews is also a prize-winning translator from the Spanish of Roberto Bolaño, César Aira, and others. Lime Green Chair translates and transforms everyday moments into auguries of time disappearing. Each of these mostly 21-line poems is finely patterned with unexpected rhyme and vowels that ring into a following line, as if directed by some hidden constraint: ‘Sounds that came into the world in my lifetime / already sound old-fangled: dial-up modems, / the implosion of a television tube / in a set dropped from a high window ...’ (‘Sonic Age’). A resigned tone, anchored by reluctant maturity, is partly formed from the persistent hendecasyllabic lines, and the grammar of present tense slipping into past and conditionals, with spiralling, diffident, qualifying phrases. These thirteen- and eight-line stanza poems each comprise 231 syllables, as the last poem ‘Envoy’ confides. An early poem, ‘The Light Sinks’, begins: ‘It’s day number sixteen thousand and something / and what have I seen?’ Almost certainly, this book contains a fittingly equal number of syllables. Lime Green Chair is split into three sections, as was Andrews’s previous book, Cut Lunch (2002),with the final section partly attempting to placate the quandaries of the first. These first and last sections follow his unusual 21-line verse form, while the middle section’s eight, mostly longer, poems are in a freer narration.

Geoff Page’s 1953 is set in the town of Eurandangee, which, we learn, is about 650 kilometres north-west of Sydney. There are other locators:

the river, with its governor’s name,
reduced now to a string of pools,

uncertain where to go;
a double shine of railway line
tracking in and stopping.

The river proves to be the Darling and, by my calculation, Eurandangee (if it existed) would be somewhere near Bourke. It is a town of ‘just a dozen blocks’ in wool and wheat country. The season is high summer; it’s 2.30 p.m. on 17 February 1953. The book never moves past that time and date. It is made up of a series of vignettes of the town’s people, observed at precisely this moment. The vignettes alternate between third-person descriptions by an omniscient narrator and named characters providing first-person self-portraits. All are written in finely crafted lines of iambic verse; usually tetrameter or trimeter.

Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’t know what you’re up to
it’s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images …

These lines from Frank O’Hara’s 1960 poem ‘Ave Maria’ seem wistfully nostalgic now that you can watch Lawrence of Arabia on your iPhone on a tram, an Israeli missile vaporising a Hamas leader, your friend’s Bali holiday on Vimeo, the latest in S&M on an iPad, or a 3D vampire zombie franchise blockbuster in your home theatre, should you be so inclined.

‘Death has a dual character,’ Zadie Smith writes in her novel The Autograph Man (2002); ‘it seems to be everywhere and nowhere at the same time’. Popular culture is currently awash with cookery programs and diet fads, yet the lives of animals, and the industries that deal in their deaths, have never been more absent from city life. It seems reasonable, therefore, that all ten stories shortlisted for the Voiceless Writing Prize – judged by J.M. Coetzee, Ondine Sherman, Wendy Were, and Susan Wyndham – animate the lives of animals in, or on the fringes of, rural Australia.

A conversation is an interactive exchange usually of a spontaneous nature. Janet Hawley’s essays are a mix of journalistic intention, conversational ruminations, observations, enquiries, and a gentle goading of her subjects about the ‘twin crucibles’ of creativity – the personality of the artist and what occurs in his or her sanctum, the studio. Assuming the role of confessional nursemaid and curious witness, Hawley profiles more than thirty successful artists, grand old men and women of the art world, explorers of real and psychological terrains, and deceased enfants terribles. These ‘conversations’ make unexpectedly compelling reading.

Ghost Wife is a timely text, given the recent debates about same-sex marriage. Michelle Dicinoski writes about travelling to Canada in 2005 to marry her girlfriend, Heather.

The pair met while undertaking postgraduate studies in Queensland. By marrying, they wanted to make a ‘permanent record’ of their relationship. Dicinoski was wary that many gays and lesbians over the centuries have been rendered ‘invisible’. She also did not want her relationship to ‘disappear’, which is a fate experienced (literally or metaphorically) by several of her family members.

Robert Gott’s The Holiday Murders fittingly begins with steely-eyed detectives examining a gruesome crime scene on Christmas Eve, 1943. The bodies of a father and son are found broken and bloodied in the dead of night, the son nailed to the floor in a ‘savage parody’ of the Crucifixion. From the memorable opening sequence, Gott demonstrates an intimate understanding of how to craft a compulsive page-turner; he exploits tropes and conventions of the crime fiction genre to dazzling effect, evoking a disturbing wartime malaise.

Louisa and Harry are both haunted. Louisa’s ghost is Tom, a son who took his own life. Harry’s spectres are no less troubling for still being alive; a failed marriage and unknown daughter pluck at his mind, are ‘imprinted on him’. These baby boomers, portrayed in alternating third-person chapters, are poorly matched against contemporary societal challenges, and possibly each other. Ex-soldier Harry’s increasing solitude is underpinned by yearning for the wartime social ideal of mateship, and life apart from women, while Louisa is in thrall to the ‘woman’s fantasy’ of shopping.

Alyssa Brugman’s Alex as Well makes us question why we read. Is it something we do to escape reality, or are we drawn to other realms that may contain deeply unsettling experiences very different from our own?

The second in the Ship Kings series has a cinematic feel and shares the first-rate quality of the first book. Set in a fantasy world where island folk live in unsettled peace under the ruling mariner class, it continues the tale of Dow Amber as he sets off on a sailing adventure aboard the battleship Chloe. He and the unusual scapegoat girl Ignella are the only outsiders aboard the Ship Kings’ vessel as it embarks on a voyage into the northern icy seas, seeking the lost son of the Sea Lord.

Here are two welcome additions to a long list of cookery publications in Australia promoting Gallic cuisine. French or French-style cookery in this country has come a long way since Ted Moloney and Deke Coleman’s charming but slight Oh, for a French Wife! was published by Ure Smith in 1952. Both Michel Roux: The Collection and Diane Holuigue’s A Lifetime of Cooking, Teaching and Writing from the French Kitchen demand a level of culinary skill, dedication, time, equipment, and household budget unimaginable for most Australian home cooks sixty years ago. Michel Roux is a Michelin-starred French chef and long-time resident in the United Kingdom. Diane Holuigue is a well-known, Melbourne-based Australian cookery teacher and writer. Through their cooking and publications, both have been hugely influential: Roux internationally, Holuigue in Australia.

Not that many Australian houses lend themselves to being the subject of a 240-page monograph. Whatever their architectural or historical merit, usually there is not enough material to warrant more than a chapter in a larger volume. Our government houses are different: not only do numerous documents and photographs survive in public records, but furnishings survive, and there is also the history of the occupants and visitors to enliven the story.