The guard with the Kalashnikov singles me out from the other passengers on the border to Ukraine. I am leaving the frozen state of Transnistria. He leads me to a small interrogation room. Four more border patrol guards and a translator are in the room. The men fossick through my bags and ask questions. ‘Are you carrying drugs or weapons?’ ‘Do you deal drugs or weapons?’ ‘Are you aware that you are entering a country that is at war?’

They pry through my belongings, perplexed by a camouflage T-shirt, a bag of toiletries, and some vitamin C tablets. They ask if I intend to fight for Ukraine. Some of the guards look strangely disappointed when I say no. Eventually I convince them that I am here as a tourist. The guard with the Kalashnikov takes me outside. Wiping the sweat from his brow, he sits down and pulls a vanilla ice cream from a refrigerated tub.

On the bus we pass endless fields of sunflowers. Weeds sprout from holes in the road. We approach a checkpoint manned by soldiers slumped over sandbags in the sun – the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag raised high above them. We’re admitted without an inspection. Some kilometres later we reach a second checkpoint and pass through unnoticed.

At dusk I walk around a park in Odessa. Some locals are smoking pot next to a shrub. Two policemen assume that I am indulging too. They frisk me thoroughly and ask to see my passport. I produce a photocopied version from my wallet. They start to arrest me for not carrying original documents. In the ensuing argument, my basic Russian and Ukrainian are soon exhausted. They just want money. I bribe them down to one hundred hryvnias.

I swim in the Black Sea and let the water lap against my ears. A military plane flies overhead, possibly heading south to Crimea. I can nearly see the region on the horizon. The war seems illusory as I float alongside hundreds of Ukrainians on holiday.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

Thirteen months earlier, my mother and I were in a taxi speeding down the highway from Boryspil airport to the Maidan square in Kyiv. The first thing my mother noticed was the proliferation of billboards lining the highway. She hadn’t been to Kyiv for thirty years. Ukraine, long free from the grip of the Soviet Union, was then under the authoritarian kleptocracy of Viktor Yanukovych.

We went to Kyiv to mark a family pilgrimage of sorts; my mother is Ukrainian, with ancestry tracing back to Lemkivshchyna, the homeland of the Lemkos ethnic minority that hails from the foothills of the Carpathian mountains in Ukraine. We knew there would be an immense disparity between our historical idea of Ukraine and contemporary Ukraine. But we were intrigued by the contradictions. It was like peering into a warped mirror that could never be straightened. Our memories felt like fiction.

My mother and I stayed in an apartment on Sofiiska Street, which runs off the Maidan. The prevalence of spoken Russian on the street accentuated our confused impressions. The city almost belonged somewhere else. We felt as lost in the old world as we did in the new. However, there was an unnameable rhythm at play. Kyiv was politically, economically, perhaps even culturally corrupted. It felt as though it might implode and vanish.

Soon after we left in September 2013, the Euromaidan revolution erupted. During months of protests, thousands of demonstrators occupied the square. The uprising culminated in sniper shootings ordered by the government. Yanukovych was inevitably overthrown and disappeared. Watching from abroad, I could almost sense the insurrectionary delirium. The Maidan was alive, but in tatters. I decided to return as quickly as possible.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

Friday, 8 August 2014. The Euromaidan revolution supposedly ended in February, yet the Maidan is still filled with activists. Some of them have been here since November, without basic food, shelter, or sanitation. The smell of human waste and kerosene is pungent. The Trades Unions Building is blackened from the fires. An enormous banner reading Cлава Украïні! (‘Glory to Ukraine’) covers the façade. Countless merchants sell revolutionary merchandise: flags, wristbands, traditional embroidered shirts, and novelty toilet paper with Putin’s face printed on the sheets.

Among the rubble in the square there are rings of men and women in earnest discussion. A bishop intones the Lord’s Prayer on the main stage. Nationalists practise self-defence as they prepare to fight in Donetsk and Luhansk.

I sit by a roadside café cart. The barista introduces himself as Vasiliy. He has been selling cheap hot dogs and coffee since the revolution began. A pack of bare-chested men in balaclavas charge past. Vasiliy looks at me and says: ‘When you wear this mask, it is not revolution – it is anarchy.’

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

Early next morning I head to the Maidan. Some of the former square protesters have voluntarily joined the Kyiv-1 battalion. They are trying to clear the Maidan of the tent city and its remaining inhabitants. The battalion believes that the revolution is becoming dogmatic and indulgent. The protesters still living there refuse to leave. It is odd seeing European Union-sympathisers turn against other EU supporters. The diehards react militantly. Barricades made of tyres, wood, and rubble are torched. The activists run around in balaclavas and makeshift armour they have fashioned from rollerblading pads. They pick up whatever is lying on the scrap heap – poles, bricks, bits of drain spouting, broken bottles – and threaten the advancing battalion.

I visit Vasiliy’s café cart. An old man is carrying innumerable packets of light bulbs. Vasiliy gives the man a few hryvnias and purchases one of the packets. I open one and find that the filigree has been removed and that the bulb is full of kerosene with a ripped piece of carpet sticking out. I hand the Molotov cocktail back to Vasiliy. He laughs and says: ‘The old man wants change, you know – nice old natural change.’

Two members of the Right Sector – an ultra-nationalist political party which is often deemed to be neo-fascist – sit down next to me. One of them, eating a hot dog, picks at the scab on his friend’s knee with the barrel of his machine gun.

Flames rise but commuters still walk through the square, seemingly complacent. The revolution may be turning in on itself, but groups of nuns stroll by eating McFlurrys. Across the road, a Kobzar plays traditional Cossack songs. A drunk soldier has passed out on the teeth of the public piano.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

On Sunday thousands gather to clear the square. Rain pelts down as people dismantle tents and barricades. The burnt tyres have been reduced to black strings; they splay out on the concrete like endless nets of scorched hair. Dozens of dump trucks remove debris and return for more. People scour through the rubble for flags to take home as souvenirs. They take down the Christmas tree that has stood in the square since October. An obese man plays the national anthem on a trumpet.

I call my local friend, Sasha. He suggests that the occupants were paid to leave. He invites me to a recovery-day party that is being held in an abandoned textiles factory. Drugs and techno seem to be the priorities of many youth on what could be deemed as the last day of the Euromaidan revolution. I stay in the square and watch the main stage being dismantled. A man jumps onstage and performs an interpretative dance. He sings a cappella gibberish as he shakes and gesticulates. People stop sweeping for a moment and watch him gyrate around the stage in ecstasy.

Though it feels hopelessly fashionable to cite him, the absurdity of this dance makes me recall a line from Slavoj Žižek back in 2009: ‘When an authoritarian régime approaches its final crisis, but before its actual collapse, a mysterious rupture often takes place. All of a sudden, people know the game is up: they simply cease to be afraid.’ The lone dance encapsulates this final rupture, spelling the definitive and successful end of the Euromaidan. It is all just decoration now.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

I walk to Zoloti Vorota Station to catch the Metro. Petro Poroshenko billboards line parts of the Metro walls. I look at the impeccable mosaics that cover the ceilings of the Metro system. I think of Sergei Parajanov’s film, Kyiv Frescoes (1966), a surreal short film dedicated to this decorative art form; how the frescoes allude to the cracked and ornate souls of Ukrainians.

Fingers pinch my arm. I turn round and find Vasiliy, there with his girlfriend, Tatiana. We are pressed into the Metro. I point to the frescoes and ask them if they are familiar with Parajanov. Vasiliy’s eyes beam at the mention of the name. ‘He understood Ukrainian culture more than Ukrainians,’ he says.

I catch the Metro to the Vokzal – the national and international train station – in order to buy a ticket for the night train to Dnipropetrovsk. When I emerge from the Metro, people are waiting outside with their luggage. The station is surrounded by police. There has been a bomb threat. We stand around and wait.

The rubble has gone. A circus is in town, with a tank of dolphins. Birds with clipped wings have returned to the Maidan; tourists have photos taken with the birds perched on the ends of their fingers.

Many die each day in the east. The so-called ‘green corridor’ keeps getting attacked. The ceasefire has been breached. Poroshenko is offering more autonomy to the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; a gesture towards another frozen conflict that will echo the betweenness of places such as Kosovo or Transnistria and that will ruin Ukraine’s chances of joining the EU. Ukraine is being used as a pawn, just as it has been historically, a pawn in the endless ruptures between East and West. I start to think of Ukraine as some grandiloquent metaphor representing the overall dysfunctional state of Europe.

I catch a taxi and head to Boryspil Airport. An Auto-Maidan convoy flies by on the other side of the road, bursting with national slogans and songs. Dusk rolls over as we climb the outskirts of Kyiv. A hymn comes on the radio. Puffing on a thin cigarette, the driver crosses himself. He turns to me and asks, ‘How many times must we wake up, up, up?’

After an explosion that killed five asylum seekers and injured dozens more on a boat moored at Ashmore Reef in 2009, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd described people smugglers as ‘the absolute scum of the earth’ and ‘the vilest form of human life’. Further tragedies at sea during the ‘fifth wave’ of boat arrivals to Australia provoked similar outbursts from politicians across the political spectrum.

Unfortunately, casting the world in black-and-white terms does not resolve complex problems. If it were merely a matter of separating the good guys from the bad guys – the ‘evil’ smugglers from their ‘helpless’ victims – then perhaps there would be more progress towards developing an ethical and effective response to boat arrivals. As these two books show, however, the devil is always in the detail with asylum policy.

In early 2013, Dawood Amiri made headlines when a Jakarta court sentenced him to six years’ jail and a fine of seventy-five million rupiah ($75,000) for helping to organise passengers for a boat to Australia. The overloaded vessel sank north of Christmas Island on 21 June 2012 and ninety-six of the 207 people on board drowned, including two of Amiri’s close friends. Amiri’s role had been to recruit passengers for the voyage. For this he received a commission of a few hundred dollars per head, a not insubstantial fee, but a relatively small cut of the average travel price of $6,000.

Erik Jensen, a young journalist who now edits the Saturday Paper, has written an unusual memoir of his four years shadowing an artist – a difficult artist, it must be said (putting it euphemistically). Any new memoirist like Jensen will be interrogated umpteen times about his motivation. Such is the fascination with biography – fascination mixed with ambivalence – he will be asked about catharsis, whether the exercise was improving, enlightening, transmogrifying. In Tardises and tents the memoirist will become adept at distilling his intentions, whether they be financial or fraternal, vengeful or venerative. In Jensen’s case, this curiosity is likely to be magnified because of his intimacy with his subject and the marked decadence of the setting. This biographer’s rationale is as intriguing as that of his beleaguered subject.

A recent exhibition at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art included two videos of scenes from modern Japanese life that at first seemed ordinary, even banal. In one, the artist Tabaimo (Ayako Tabata) animates the interior of a train, with views of passing suburbs; in the other, she shows a mansion from a bygone century, opening like a doll’s house to display its plush furnishings. But then things begin to change. Human body parts appear on the train’s luggage racks, an egg on the floor explodes, and the view of the next carriage morphs into a caged prison. Squid-like tentacles penetrate the house, a door opens to reveal a pulsating brain, and a torrent of water pours out. The climax of the train video shows a man lying on the track becoming a red sun on a white screen; the doll’s house one ends with the flood subsiding, and the two halves of the building closing up. The restored street frontage is bland, but no less puzzling.

Haruki Murakami’s writing reveals a similar aesthetic, like the bizarre fantasies in old woodblock prints. Many of his books, both fact and fiction, begin as blandly as Tabaimo’s videos, with accounts of ordinary life somewhere in modern Japan. Often there is a disingenuous, solitary young man whose parents are remote or absent, a large old house, an elegant older woman, a wise male friend, a worldly girlfriend. As well there is jazz, a particular piece of classical music, casual clothes carefully chosen, a demanding exercise régime, food and wine sparingly consumed at home or in small restaurants, and details of journeys by car or train, often to a dark forest. But all is not as it seems. Inexplicable events and strange physical sensations soon begin to worry the young man who, typically, is too diffident to unburden himself to others. In several of Murakami’s narratives, the young man seems to enter a parallel universe where he is pursued by strange forces, or where he suspects that in another self he has done something dreadful to people close to him.

Haruki Murakami (photograph by Emma Seibert)

Such a universe opens up to Aomame when she climbs down a stair from an overhead expressway, in Murakami’s massive 1Q84 (2009, in English 2011).Her dangerous task is to seek out the leader of a religious cult; in the process she finds Tengo, who is equally puzzled and threatened by the events and people he encounters in that underworld. In Kafka on the Shore (2003, in English 2005), a student who runs away from home and school is given refuge in a private library supervised by an enigmatic elderly lady. Kafka – as he calls himself, choosing an idiosyncratic name as several of Murakami’s young people do – comes to believe that he is guilty of Oedipal patricide and incest. These otherworlds of Murakami’s invention are the weird, dark underside of Japan’s well-lit, orderly, quotidian society. His non-fiction book Underground (1997, in English 2000), about the 1995 Sarin gas attack on Tokyo subway trains, similarly contrasts the superficial calm and the chaotic depths. Commuters and railway staff who, for their own reasons, did not break out of their morning routine and rush upstairs to the fresh air became the victims of Aum Shinrikyo, a bizarre cult led by a blind guru, whose reason for the attack was never fully explained. At the end, as with much of Murakami’s writing, what’s left is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, as Churchill said of Russia.

In his new novel, Murakami recombines these familiar ingredients for his devoted public. Tsukuru, a young man who has been dropped without explanation by his four Nagoya schoolfriends, is so deeply hurt that, even after he stops wanting to die, he feels hollow and worthless. He is tormented about what he may, unwittingly or even in another identity, have done to deserve their contempt. But he cannot raise it with them, nor tell his family, so every day he goes to work in Tokyo designing railway stations, and apart from the odd affair that goes nowhere, that is his life. A wise male friend, Haida, puts Tsukuru back in touch with his emotions before he, too, disappears. A slightly older woman, Sara, whom Tsukuru is beginning to love, urges him to find the three former school friends who remain – one has been murdered. He elicits a different story about what happened from each one, in the manner of Rashōmon. There is also a journey to Finland, to a dark forest, where he finds some understanding of the enigma. But the outcome isn’t certain there, nor back in Tokyo: his pilgrimage has no end.

Murakami offers a detailed description of a railway station, this time Shinjuku. Once again there is a chosen theme, Liszt’s ‘Le Mal du Pays’, from Years of Pilgrimage, which the dead school friend played. (When Murakami selects a piece, like the Janáček Sinfonietta in 1Q84, the CD becomes a bestseller in Japan.) As with 1Q84 and Kafka, the novel comes with a striking cover design. This time, coloured circles representing the names of Tsukuru’s four friends make the book instantly recognisable in a shop, or in a train carriage. There is nothing enigmatic about such clever marketing, nor about releasing the novel at midnight like a new iPhone. The hints from reviewers and publishers about a future Nobel Prize for Murakami’s impressive oeuvre are becoming broader.

Peter Carey’s new novel, Amnesia, is an odd-shaped – but not misshaped – tale about power and, more particularly, resistance to power. When the veteran leftist journalist Felix Moore writes the story of Gaby Baillieux, a young Australian cyber-activist, he finds himself, like Gaby, a fugitive. As if by magic, Gaby has unlocked Australian and US prison doors; it is Felix’s job, when he’s not guzzling red wine, to make her likeable enough to avoid extradition. But Felix has an independent agenda: using hours of tape recordings made by Gaby and her famous mother, Celine, he fashions his own version of Gaby’s life, taking the sort of liberties you might expect from a journalist with a penchant for writing failed novels and attracting libel writs.

Amnesia contains multiple personal, political, personal-political, and cross-generational threads. It is a sprawling construction that draws together the past and something approximating the present, with a nod to a discordant future. Among much else, Carey links three key moments: the 1942 Battle of Brisbane, when Australian and US forces fought each other on Brisbane streets; John Kerr’s removal of the Whitlam government in 1975, which Felix firmly believes was a CIA coup designed to protect the US base at Pine Gap; and Gaby and her group’s very twenty-first-century challenge to the established order of things. The point of these threads is not merely that all events, or all people for that matter, are connected; rather, the point, certainly from Felix’s perspective, is to highlight society’s capacity to overlook political crimes and shenanigans.

In Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally acclaimed My Struggle cycle, we are taken back to where the series began: an island in southern Norway, seven-year-old Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve live under the tyranny of a cruel and taciturn father in the mid-1970s. Unlike the first volume, A Death in the Family (2012), which stays with young Karl Ove for only a few pages before casting off in many different directions, Boyhood Island follows him from ages seven to thirteen in a rarely broken, linear fashion. It ends neatly on the last day of class for the year, as Karl Ove’s family prepares to leave Tromoya, and he farewells a group of friends.

Fairfax Media, which has churned out millions of words since its beginnings in Sydney in the 1830s, has itself inspired hundreds of thousands of words in the last year or so. First came Colleen Ryan’s Fairfax: The Rise and Fall (June 2013), followed by Pamela Williams’ Killing Fairfax (July 2013). Now comes Stop the Presses! by Ben Hills, a veteran investigative journalist who would no doubt self-identify as a ‘Fairfax lifer’, like many characters in his book. Just in case the theme of these tomes isn’t clear, we have Hills’s subtitle: How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax.

All three books cover, in their own way, Fairfax Media’s struggles since the 1990s, as it failed to migrate its business to the Internet, and to profitably bring together its print and digital operations. Hills calculates that at the 2012 Fairfax annual general meeting a company which had once been capitalised at $9 billion was then worth $900 million; the loss in 2011–12 was more than half the size of the entire budget of Tasmania; and it was possible to buy two shares for the cost of one Fairfax paper by 2008. As the author explains, Fairfax Media did not have a crisis with audience – its free websites were market leaders – but with revenue.

David Syme made his name and his fortune in newspapers – specifically The Age – and his life’s course might be compared with the workings of a gigantic web offset press.

I have watched such machines at work. They start off slow; the rolls of naked newsprint snake by gently, round and round. When the presses roar to life the noise is astonishing; the paper is stretched like the thinnest of skins as it flashes, smooth and furious, through the machine, soaking up words and pictures. If the paper breaks, the whole thing unravels and the run must be reset. So it was with Syme, the brilliant but perplexing man who owned and ran The Age from 1860 until his death in 1908. At its peak in the 1880s, only the London dailies had higher circulations. One in ten people in Melbourne bought a copy.

Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson dressed an actor in armour to open his play Poetaster. The Prologue explained:

If any muse why I salute the stage,
An armèd Prologue, know, ’tis a
dangerous age,
Wherein who writes had need present
his scenes
Forty-fold proof against the conjuring
means
Of base detractors and illiterate apes,
That fill up rooms in fair and formal
shapes.

A dangerous age, and Ben Jonson was not a circumspect man. This new edition of all Ben Jonson’s work brings out the valiant nature of his achievement.

Which poets have most influenced you?

First encounters sink deep: Shelley, Blake, Hopkins, Yeats. The Revelators in my youth: Rimbaud, Lorca, Hart Crane. The Golden Codgers of middle age: Mallarmé, Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, and David Malouf. Life Support: Wallace Stevens and Thomas Traherne. The Diamond-headed hard men of technique: Ezra Pound, Louis Zukofsky, and James McAuley’s last four books.

Aproaching Thomas Wyatt’s great but notoriously resistant poem ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek / With naked foot stalking in my chamber’, poet and critic Vincent Buckley wrote, ‘The sense of purposive yet mysterious activity created in this opening stanza is also a matter of its sensuousness … The critical problem is to define this … sensuousness … [I]t is not to identify the kind of animal suggested in the analogy. I have heard deer, birds, and mice proposed for this purpose; my own preference is for racehorses, but it is as irrelevant as any other. It is far more important to identify their action than to identify them.’

When I first read this comment as a student, I remember feeling a surge of relief undercutting my anxiety at having to tackle Wyatt. Here was a human voice, a critic speaking, certainly, concerned ‘to present the work, not to enclose it’, but a voice nevertheless unequivocally and openly connected to the world that surrounded me as I pored over ‘They flee from me’; a world in which racehorses were alive and interesting, though not at that moment important.

I dealt with China for most of the ten years I worked for the British Foreign Office from 1998. The one conclusion I drew from my experience over those years was that it didn’t take much to stumble into complexity. Britain and China have a vast historic hinterland. In 1839, British forces inflicted the first Opium War on China, and British politicians enforced the unequal treaties which ushered in what some Chinese call to this day ‘the century of humiliation’. In the hundred years that followed, Britain continued meddling and became involved in issues from Tibet to Hong Kong, building up a fund of resentment on the Chinese side that continues to pay back returns to the current day.

Australia’s relations with China are free of this harsh background noise. They are mercifully unstained by unpleasant memory or contentious history. As Andrew Charlton writes in his essay ‘Dragon’s Tail: The Lucky Country after the China Boom’, it has culminated in two decades of almost sublime simplicity. Since the 1990s, put bluntly, China has made us rich. From an indifferent twentieth century, in which the overall trajectory of the Australian economy was either flat, or downwards, the resource hunger of a booming China pumping, growing at an average rate of ten per cent each year, has lifted Australia to the richest per capita of major developed economies.

Sitting, a few years ago, in the audience at a writers’ festival in the south-west of Western Australia, at a panel session hosted by Jennifer Byrne, I was struck by the widespread reaction to one of the panellists announcing that the book she had chosen to discuss was Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet (now securely canonised as an ‘Australian national classic’, as Fiona Morrison’s essay in this volume points out). A ripple of reverential approval went through the auditorium and discreet murmurs of ‘my favourite book’ were exchanged. This response demonstrated the feeling aroused by Winton and his work in a large section of the general reading public, particularly in the West.

The introduction to this major collection of critical essays on Winton’s work opens on this note. Winton is ‘one of Australia’s most popular … novelists’. Yet, for the editors, the national – and increasingly international – popularity of Winton’s writing has perhaps complicated and delimited critical attention to that work and its undeniable literariness – that is, he is both a ‘popular and literary’ writer. Their hope is that this volume ‘will begin to redress the relative dearth of critical debate about the literature of Tim Winton’.

Now and again it is good to remind ourselves that literary history (and I think the history of the other arts) is strewn with the names of those who had great stature in their own time and are now largely forgotten, and with the names of others for whom the reverse is true. William Blake, short of money, went to work for the much more admired poet William Hayley. These days, the name ‘William Hayley’ will only conjure up ‘Rock Around the Clock’. Even Samuel Johnson, perhaps the greatest of all literary critics, thought Abraham Cowley ‘undoubtedly the best’ of the Metaphysical poets, and it took three hundred years for John Donne’s reputation to be firmly established.

Australia’s literary tradition is short enough that we have fewer such figures, but it is striking that the three most popularly successful poets in our history wander in that inner circle of forgottenness with Cowley: Adam Lindsay Gordon, A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, and C.J. Dennis. Paterson might not quite belong, but only because he wrote ‘Waltzing Matilda’, and there is almost no interest in his work in scholarly circles.

Late in 1986, the Australian Bicentennial Authority took sixty celebrities off to Uluru to make the television advertisement containing the jingle ‘Celebration of a Nation’. Just as the shoot finished, a heavy storm broke, prompting the stars to run for cover. ‘Oh, darling,’ cried Jeanne Little, a popular television personality at the time. ‘The real Australia’s quite frightening, isn’t it?’

Don Watson would surely agree. His celebrated book on Paul Keating was called Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), but even when he draws attention to the mass destruction of animal life in drought and flood, the killing of native animals for profit, the butchery of wild horses, or the brutality of industrialised slaughter in abattoirs, The Bush: Travels in the Heart of Australia is not the work of a bleeding heart. Watson does nothing to obscure the brutal reality of rural life as it has been lived in Australia: the violence of colonists towards Aboriginal people, the mass killing of native animals and stock, the almost frenzied destruction of trees and scrub as settlers cleared the land in the quest for independence and civilisation. Yet he is also sympathetic to the men and women on the land, recognises the value and importance of what they do, and is more than capable of casting a cool eye on the easy judgements that city folk so often make about them. There is affection for farmers and farming, but also the sharp perspective of an observer able to see rural enterprise in the wider context of Australia’s history and environment. Wealthy graziers are applying the latest science to their farms – they love their Roundup – but are decidedly hostile when the same kind of scientific enquiry that puts dollars in their wallets also points to anthropogenic climate change, the harmful effects on humans of the chemicals they use on their crops, and the damage their stock is doing to the environment. Yet Watson also meets country people doing their best to rejuvenate the ruined land, and he manages to see beauty in landscapes that ecologists would tell us have been destroyed by bad farming and other abuses.

There is a long tradition of physicians turned writers, including Chekhov, Keats, Conan Doyle, and Somerset Maugham. More recent doctor–novelists include Alexander McCall Smith, Michael Crichton, and Khaled Hosseini. In Australia, Peter Goldsworthy is probably our most prominent writer–physician, with John Murray and now Paul Komesaroff joining the tradition.

Medicine provides plenty of material for the novelist. As Peter Goldsworthy said in an interview in the Medical Journal of Australia: ‘You can’t write a novel unless you have constant human contact – talking to people, listening to what they say, and studying their character – medicine’s perfect for that.’ A medical practitioner sees diverse people, often in crisis. They watch relationships change, and fail to change. They witness messy storylines being played out in front of them. They confront birth and death, disease and desire.

Beams Falling is a good example of its kind: a sweaty, grimy Sydney-based noir. I wish that were higher praise, but there is an endless procession of local crime fiction out there – much of which seems to emanate from Sydney – and the competition has not set the bar overly high.

Inga Simpson’s second novel is set in the lush subtropical hinterland of Australia’s east coast. Jen, a reclusive artist, goes back to where she grew up and where her father was a timber-cutter, to find peace among the birds and trees. But mysteries and disappearances trouble her idyllic life.

Like her artist protagonist, Simpson has acute powers of observation and an ability to capture nature on the page. The vivid colours of rainforest birds and the intricate growth of forests, set to a soundtrack of birdsong, lulls the reader. However, the nesting theme threads together a narrative more fragile than compelling.

Simpson is an accomplished writer and excels, not only at natural descriptions, but at action and dialogue, which could have played a bigger part. What detracts from an otherwise fine novel is the use of truncated chapters, with confusing jumps in time from one scene to the next. The few dramatic events often seem suspended in time, without consequences. After being seriously injured in an accident, Jen is next seen hiking through rainforest and climbing trees without a twinge of pain.

Miriam Sved’s début novel is a structurally innovative portrait of élite Australian football as a juggernaut that leaves lives scrambling and spent in its wake. Its fourteen stories, each told from a different narrative perspective, form a prismatic study of a single season in the lives of Mick Reece and Jake Dooley, two first-year recruits at an unnamed, present-day AFL club. The novel’s true focus, however, is the internal worlds of those around them – parents, older teammates, club staff, self-identified WAGs, supporters, journalists – caught up in the trick of fame which has ensnared these young men.

Wisps of smoke, lamplight on manuscripts.
Pages fanned across an oak stool.
The hearth absorbs the stain of living.

The concert pianist Alfred Brendel is one of the leading twentieth-century interpreters of music, with a special interest in the German repertoire. When he retired in 2008 after six decades of performing, he did so not through loss of stamina, but because of crippling arthritis in his hands. Brendel continues, at eighty-three, to teach, lecture, and write. (His poetry collection, Playing the Human Game [2011] contains one of the most damning attacks on that well-known pest, the concert cougher.) A Pianist’s A–Z explores his personal relationship with the piano. It covers the classical repertoire, offering insights, asides, reflections, and the occasional and excruciatingly corny joke.

This slim volume is hardly intended to be anything other than a selection of choice vignettes. ‘A’ is straightforward enough and includes entries on Accents, Arrangements, and Artists. As the reader counts down the remainder of the alphabet, the associations become more obscure. You could skip the last three letters entirely. ‘X’ is devoted to a single entry for Canon X: Conlon Nancarrow’s music for player piano. ‘Y’ is given over to ‘Yuck’, as Brendel notes, ‘an exclamation of displeasure’; while ‘Z’ stands for Zvonimir, legendary king of the Croats, whose relationship to music, Brendel assures us, is ‘at best, peripheral’.

By now we know what to expect from an Andrew Upton adaptation of a Russian play – brisk, overlapping dialogue with anachronistic turns of phrase and use of four-letter words. With the Sydney Theatre Company’s Uncle Vanya (2010), this approach, in combination with Támas Ascher’s brilliant production, worked superbly to blow away the miasma of gloom and torpor that usually blankets anglophone Chekhov. It was considerably less successful when the STC turned to Mikhail Bulgakov’s wonderful play The Days of the Turbins (2011) and the novel on which it was based, The White Guard. Here the loss of Bulgakov’s elegant, elliptical, slyly humorous style was compounded with a messy production and a cast that was, on average, a decade too old for their roles. With Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun, the results are mixed. The modern language adds immediacy but it is jarring to hear a refined sheltered woman of the turn of the last century use the word ‘fuck’.

Lucky Shirley Temple! Film star biographies are usually made up of a chronology laced with doubtful studio publicity and salacious gossip. But The Little Girl Who Fought the Great Depression is written by a reigning scholar of American culture, John F. Kasson. A professor of History and American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kasson takes entertainment seriously. For more than forty years, beginning with Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (1971), he has uncovered the cultural significance of popular leisure-time activities, places, and personalities in a style that is both scholarly and entertaining. His Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (2001) used three mini-biographies to explore the ‘masculinity crisis’ of the early twentieth century. In The Little Girl, he focuses on one icon to help us see how Americans survived the Great Depression.

‘I get awful intense about these movies I do. I become, in fact, obsessed with them.’ So Elia Kazan (1909–2003) wrote to his daughter in 1957. A workaholic, Kazan was both extremely self-assured and plagued by self-doubt, terrified he would produce mediocrity. He rarely did. As a stage and screen director he achieved remarkable success. Kazan was an egotist, and the confidence he exhibited publicly, and in these letters, is at once impressive and repugnant.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky

Dear Editor,

I was very disappointed that the review ‘Putin and the Kleptocrats’ gave such a misleading impression of Mikhail Khodorkovsky (August 2014). Nick Hordern seemed to have no idea of Khodorkovsky’s Damascene moments when he began to understand and adhere to the (small l) liberal underpinnings of a civil society, working on many fronts, and of course against the odds, to try to establish it in Russia. Yes, Khodorkovsky was imprisoned, but that did not stop him from becoming an iconic inspiration, as Richard Sakwa demonstrates but Mr Hordern bypasses. There is much talk of people underestimating others in this review, but in this case Mr Hordern has vastly underestimated one of the main subjects, as though Khodorkovsky were no different from the other oligarchs. As if!

Judith Armstrong (online comment)

Calibre Prize

The Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay is open again. The winner will receive $5,000. This year, for the first time, Calibre is open to writers around the world. We also have a quick, inexpensive online entry system. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries close on 19 January 2015. The judges on this occasion are Delia Falconer and Peter Rose, our Editor.

Calibre has been a major contributor to the renascence of the essay in this country. Past winners include Kevin Brophy, Christine Piper, and Martin Thomas. This is the ninth time we have offered Calibre. We are only able to do because of the continuing generosity of Mr Colin Golvan QC.

Our Environment issue

Danielle Clode

We’re having fun planning our first Environment issue, to be published in November, with grand support from the Bjarne K. Dahl Trust. The centre-piece is a long article by Danielle Clode, the inaugural ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. This special issue will also feature a photo essay by renowned photographer Alison Pouliot. Other contributors include Tom Griffiths, Ruth Morgan, Mark McKenna, Ian Lowe, and Bill Gammage.

To celebrate this new direction, ABR will host a launch party at Boyd on Tuesday, 11 November (6 pm, Assembly Hall). Danielle Clode will read from and discuss her Fellowship article. Everyone is most welcome. This is a free event, but reservations are essential and should be sent to: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Nature Writing Prize

Like Calibre, the Nature Writing Prize – now being offered for the third time – is worth $5,000. The Nature Conservancy, which presents this prize, seeks essays of 3,000 to 5,000 words that are ‘set within an Australian Landscape and explore the author’s sense of “place”’. ABR will publish the winning essay. Entries close on 24 December, so we know what the judges – Jesse Blackadder and Robert Gray – will be doing over Christmas. Enter now via TNC's website.

A fine comic talent

Laurie Clancy (1942–2010) was an integral player in the entrenchment of ABR in its second guise. During the 1980s it was rare for an issue not to carry a review or article by Clancy; he wrote for the magazine dozens of times. Clancy published novels and criticism, but his short stories are particularly esteemed. Peter Pierce rates him as ‘one of the finest comic talents to write short fiction in Australia’. Now we have a substantial collection of the short stories: Jovial Harbinger of Doom (Michael Hanrahan Publishing, $35 pb), selected and edited by Richard Freadman. A review will follow.

Give a free gift subscription to ABR

We’re feeling generous again. New and renewing subscribers have until 31 December to give a friend a six-month subscription to ABR (print or online). You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current subscription even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR?

To take up this offer all you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies this issue, call us on (03) 9699 8822 or email us at:This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number, if you have one). We will contact the nominated recipient to establish whether he or she wants the print edition or ABR Online (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Terms and conditions apply.

Comments on our website

Comments on our website are increasing in volume each month (we print some of them on our Letters page). But some commenters are a little confused about our online system. Here are some tips.

If you are, or have been, an ABR Online subscriber, you will need to log-in to ABR Online in order to post a comment. If you have forgotten your log-in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email us your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) at the email below: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will review your comment and post it under your name.

Readers’ Choice Award

Our three prize-winning stories in the 2014 Jolley Prize are now free to read on our website. Readers still have until 20 October to vote in the Readers’ Choice Award. To nominate your favourite story and be in the running for our prizes, simply email us the title of the story you wish to nominate, along with your full name, address, and telephone number. The email is: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

One lucky voter will receive twenty-five Text Classics, courtesy of Text Publishing. Two voters will receive two-year complimentary subscriptions to ABR Online.

The title of Cassandra Atherton’s anthology, Travelling Without Gods, alludes to the particular brand of agnosticism that has run through Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s work over many decades. Journeying sans deity is evidenced strongly in the poet’s latest collection, a book which, like Atherton’s, has been published to coincide with Wallace-Crabbe’s eightieth birthday.

For a non-believer, Wallace-Crabbe’s My Feet Are Hungry makes frequent reference to Christian ideology. This is in marked contrast to a number of Australian poets – Judith Beveridge, Barry Hill, Robert Gray among them – whose work in recent years testifies to the influence of Buddhism. Wallace-Crabbe’s Christian saviour is located firmly in the historical rather than the sacred. Only mildly irreverent, the poet shows respect for a figure who sides with the disadvantaged in an era of raging commercial interest and power-mad politicians: ‘Did Roman nails deserve his blood? / Even for someone who venerates money / Here is a story of absolute good’ (‘And the Cross’).

A striking feature of this collection of Geoffrey Lehmann’s poetry of fifty-six years is how few loci of interest there are: ancient Rome, a farm in rural New South Wales, parenthood. His characteristic mode seems to be to explore these exhaustively by holding them up to the light and investigating every facet. Wallace Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ hovers behind these poems as an emblem of their method, and it is no accident that the fifth-last poem is called ‘Thirteen Reviews of the New Babylon Inn’.

We meet this in the first group of poems, ‘Simple Sonnets’. Their title is, I suspect, an allusion to Prokofiev’s ‘Simple Symphony’, which established a good strategy for artists keen to do something distinctively new in an established, rather old-fashioned form which is already the site of forbidding masterworks of the past. There are fourteen of them; one more than the poems about the blackbird, but one for each line of a sonnet. Each poem is made up of seven roughly rhymed couplets, and they tap into the near-nightmare world of some of the border ballads: ‘I saw a deaf man feeding with the pigs, / And further on among some poison figs / A child lay dead.’

Just over fifty years since the death of the great American poet William Carlos Williams, it is pleasing to see so much of his spirit still alive in Cameron Lowe’s third collection, Circle Work. Williams was often short-changed by poets who, mistakenly, thought his short, ‘photographic’ poems easy to imitate. Lowe, by contrast, fully understands the importance of close observation and imagination. He understands, too, the necessity for skilled syntax and how a poem may consist wholly of details which are not in the least ‘poetic’.

The Unspeak Poems, Tim Thorne’s fourteenth collection, is characteristically politically engaged and international in its scope. The best of these poems make use of Thorne’s acute ear for everyday speech. ‘Gettin’ there’, for instance, sad and memorable, creates through jumpy fragments of wry observations and narrative a picture of misguided hope against loaded odds: ‘The saddest place I’ve ever seen / is the bus shelter outside Risdon prison. / You lose about one teddy bear per eviction / on average.’ The same talent is used to different effect in recording the incoherence of racism in ‘7/11’.

Axon’s commitment to publishing new research in creativity and the creative process is highlighted in this issue on poetry. Lucy Dougan, consultant editor, introduces its exploration of ‘how poetry constitutes knowledge; how it is made; how poets think about their work’, and one of the exhaustive questions in the academy: ‘how poetry may be understood as research.’ Like Text: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, Axon’s open access enhances ‘the free exchange of ideas’. Since many of the same writers have been published in both journals, Axon reads like a more techno-savvy sister publication.

It was timely that halfway through reading this book, I glanced up to see Clive Palmer on Q&A vowing to stand up to ‘the Chinese mongrels’. It was as if a columnist from the Bulletin circa 1895 had risen from the grave to thump a battered tub and warn us about the monster intent on destroying ‘our Australian way of life’. Images like these still lurk in the bedrock of White Australian consciousness, and Palmer’s outburst was a reminder of how readily they can be summoned.

As Agnieszka Sobocinska notes in her introduction, in the absence of a ‘Declaration of Independence’ or a ‘Bill of Rights’ independent Australia’s founding document and expression of its core values took the form of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the first legislation to be passed by the new parliament, which positioned the nation as an enclave of White civilisation adrift in an Asian sea. While the Act was progressively dismantled through the second half of the twentieth century, the nervous world view that spawned it has continued to trouble conceptions of national identity and the nation’s place in the wider region. And, like Palmer’s outburst and his backtracking in the days that followed, the Act, stiffened with resolve about sovereignty, the national economy, wages, and the labour market, was animated by reference to race, the moral superiority of White Australians, and anxieties about the threats allegedly posed by the Asian hordes to our north.

North Korea always gets media attention for negative reasons: a border skirmish with its southern neighbour; a missile trial launch or nuclear test; vitriolic propaganda attacks on South Korea, Japan, or the United States; or the appalling findings of some human rights group like Michael Kirby’s recent UN Commission of Inquiry on North Korea’s human rights abuses. The picture that emerges is one of unrelenting misery within North Korea and unreasoned aggressiveness towards its enemies – a dangerous and unpredictable country which, if it cannot be reformed, is best either shunned or guarded against.

The German film The Lives of Others (2006) ends with a coda, set after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in which protagonist Georg Dreyman is finally allowed access to the volumes of secret files collected on him by the Stasi. Apart from the sheer number, what strikes Georg most is the utter banality of the information contained within. It is a familiar reaction among the contributors to Dirty Secrets, a collection of essays from prominent Australians on the receipt of their ASIO files.

Meredith Burgmann, who has edited these essays, is refreshingly honest as to her aims. ‘I wanted to look at the effect of spying on those who have been its targets,’ she says in her introduction. Delightedly she adds, ‘We are finally writing about them instead of them writing about us.’ The lingering outrage underpinning the book rarely subsides.

When Josephine Baker died in Paris in April 1975, it was almost fifty years since her sensational triumph in that city in 1925 as the star of La Revue Nègre. Her legendary status in France today remains linked to her emblematic role in the extraordinary unleashing of emotion and sensuality that came with the French Jazz Age and its upheaval of tradition. But her image also includes her work in the Resistance during the German Occupation, work which saved lives and assisted vital communication, earning her the Croix de Guerre, the Resistance Medal, and the Legion of Honour. Both culturally and politically she is perceived as a figure of liberation. Her experiment in adopting a large multiracial family – The ‘Rainbow Tribe’ – and raising the children in her Dordogne château, while generally shrugged off as a failed Utopian dream, and the cause of the financial ruin that necessitated her rescue by Princess Grace of Monaco, is also seen as evidence of a laudable anti-racist stance. And her humanitarian activism in the United States and South America are folded into the same positive picture of a woman who, having chosen France as her heartland, has been elected by the French as a national treasure.

‘Spellbinding’ is an apt word to sum up the effects created by Russian-born German artist Walter Spies in his phantasmagoric, darkly glowing landscapes and figure paintings, particularly those that he fashioned when living in Java and Bali between 1923 and 1941. Tropical luxuriance has other superlative renderers in art – Gauguin, ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, Donald Friend – but none of their works has the eerie, mesmeric intensity of Spies’s. He deserves a full retrospective exhibition at that temple of early twentieth-century German art, the Neue Galerie, in New York (the last show of his work was in Holland back in 1980), but for the moment we can feast our eyes on the sumptuous illustrations in John Stowell’s biographical study of the artist – the first study in English of such substance, and a long-evolving project by an Australian scholar based at the University of Newcastle.

Last Bets examines the case of Anthony Dunning, a forty-year-old man who died four days after being pinned to the floor face-down by bouncers at Melbourne’s Crown casino in July 2011. The incident was reported to police not by Crown but by Dunning’s friends two days later, while the man lay in intensive care. A spokesperson for the police said that Crown was not required by law to have reported the incident, though ‘they probably had a moral obligation’ to do so.

With the advent of digital technology and the Internet, traditional paper-based scholarship appears increasingly threatened with redundancy, if not total obsolescence. This may help to explain current interest in the various techniques adopted by early modern natural philosophers and scholars who struggled to cope with the diverse and rapidly expanding bodies of data at their disposal.

Raimond Gaita is unusual among moral philosophers in having presented the world of his childhood as food for thought. Most notably, he has given us his Romanian father, Romulus – ‘Johnny the Balt’ to his Australian neighbours – whose understanding of life’s moral necessities is articulated by Gaita as the core of his ethical thought. It is hard to think of an instance in the history of Western philosophy, other than the Socrates of Plato’s Apology, where an individual’s life story is as intrinsic to the views expounded as the life of Romulus Gaita is to those of his son.

The connection hasn’t always been clear. When Gaita first made his indelible mark with Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (1991), calling it to account for its lack of moral seriousness, Romulus was not mentioned. The profound influence of father on son became apparent with the publication of Romulus, My Father (1998), but it was only in After Romulus (2011) that we begin to see that the ‘moral genius’ here (to quote a homeless man at one of Gaita’s book readings) is, in the first instance, not Raimond, but Romulus. And so we should see it, for the younger Gaita has consistently emphasised that it is in the nature of goodness to reveal the uniquely individual and irreducible humanity of others. The more we are moved by Romulus and his world, and the less we are dazzled by Gaita’s depth and subtlety of thought, the more the latter’s philosophy succeedson its own terms.

Eli Glasman’s début novel is aimed at a Young Adult audience, but should also enjoy a long life on adult fiction shelves. Seemingly based on Glasman’s own upbringing as an Orthodox Jew in Caulfield, a Melbourne suburb, the book is fascinating in its candid observations of the rituals, strictures, and arcane customs of Orthodox Judaism, particularly those of the Lubavitch sect, with its emphasis on outreach to non-observant Jews and its belief in the imminence of the Messiah.

The brain, notes philosopher Paul Churchland, is the engine of reason and the seat of the soul. David Roland’s memoir of stroke and its aftermath presents a vivid picture of engine failure and a soul unseated. His book lays bare the disorienting realities of brain injury and his gradual but faltering steps towards recovery. In time he adjusts to having a somewhat less powerful cognitive engine and achieves a more well-upholstered sense of self.

How I Rescued My Brain pivots around a stroke that Roland, an Australian clinical psychologist, experienced in 2009. However, the story begins years earlier, and Roland’s suffering is not reducible to a single cerebral event. In 2006 he is in his late forties and, to outward appearances, the epitome of middle-class success. He has a busy private practice, a family, friends, and property investments. But he is also heartsick. His marriage is in trouble, his investments precarious, his father dying. Anxieties leave him tired and prone to nightmares, panics, pains, and suicidal thoughts. He is disengaging from his work, intensely upset by the suffering of his patients. He diagnoses himself as experiencing a post-traumatic reaction brought on by vicariously experiencing the horrors they have witnessed or perpetrated. Clinical empathy has burned him out.