Christos Tsiolkas has established himself as a fiction writer to be reckoned with, especially since the publication of the explosive Dead Europe (2005) and the bestselling The Slap (2008). His latest novel, Barracuda (2013), marked a return to the adolescent anger and simpler naturalism of his early work. So his new volume of stories, Merciless Gods, may offer some help in understanding the trajectory of his career and his changing interests.

Among the early stories found here, ‘Civil War’, first collected in the Picador New Writing anthology for 1995, still carries an impact. The story’s narrator is hitching his way to Sydney across the Nullarbor Plain, listening to the racist remarks of the truck drivers he meets and recalling his brief sexual encounter in Perth with a young Aboriginal drug addict. The Civil War of the title is anticipated by the truck drivers who are arming in preparation for a massacre of Aboriginal people. The story moves into a slightly surreal world – has the drug-addicted narrator imagined the extremism of the truckies, just as he mistook a kangaroo on the road for an Aboriginal man? Tsiolkas confronts us with the logical consequence of violent racial hatred, and it stays with the young man like a bad dream after he arrives in Sydney. Curiously, the story begins with the line: ‘After drugs there is only God.’ The narrator is searching for ‘some intimation of spirit’, like a character from a David Malouf or Patrick White novel, but nothing beats heroin.

Young male characters narrate other stories, relying on the present tense for a sense of immediacy in the conventional Kerouac manner. ‘Saturn Return’ has two young men travelling to Sydney to visit the dying father of the narrator’s friend. Both young men have been to university, but they see themselves as poor: ‘Being poor means you have to break the law.’ It is a badge of honour and a justification for drug-dealing. Yet the story reveals a tenderness as it considers the dying days of the father and ponders the meaning of his life. ‘Hung Phat!’ follows its narrator’s relationship with a school friend, a girl this time, who becomes a film-maker. In ‘Jessica Lange in Frances’, the narrator has his first homosexual experience surrounded by the noise, smells, and detritus of inner-city life.

Though Tsiolkas is obviously clever and observant, this kind of material can become predictable, and the more recent stories show him creating more mature and varied characters, the kind of people who feature in The Slap. The title story’s narrator tells us about an evening ‘many years ago’ when a group of young Melbourne professionals, masquerading as friends, share a dinner to farewell a member of the group. Their complacency is disrupted by a storytelling game that leads one guest to claim that he once cut off a boy’s hand in Turkey. The incident may not have happened, but the manner of its telling strips the pretence of friendship from the group. It is not only what you tell, but how you tell it.

Christos Tsiolkas

Other stories also focus on middle-class professionals moving towards middle age, their only unconventionality being their predominantly homosexual relationships. Yet they retain some of the adolescent anger that marks so many of Tsiolkas’s younger characters. They are the kind of people who get ‘the shits’ at unresponsive servants in New York, or mouth obscenities when their plane is delayed in Cairo. Impatient, bad-tempered, foul-mouthed, they are people to be avoided in whatever real life they might inhabit. They represent the worst of the new generation of well-heeled, well-educated Australians who are making their mark in the world. They could so easily be the subjects of satire, but Tsiolkas never mocks them. He holds to a discipline of sympathy with his characters, no matter how repellent they may be, and restricts his own verbal range to the limits of their vocabularies. It is a serious inhibition for a writer to accept, as it reduces so much of his fiction to the platitudes and obscenities of shallow characters.

In his early work, this appeared to be a political position – where the writer insists on identifying with alienated characters, portraying their perspective on the petit bourgeois world of suburban Australia. Tsiolkas seemed to identify with young gay men trying to live outside the society they believed had rejected them. Most of the characters in his later fiction have accommodated themselves to professional success, but Tsiolkas refrains from venting the criticism and moral disgust that he invites from his readers. He also denies himself the possibilities of wit and humour.

Tsiolkas’s deliberate confining of himself to the inarticulate, frequently obscene language of his characters often renders his writing banal and dangerously close to self-parody. At the same time, he raises the issue of language in several stories here. In ‘Sticks and Stones’ and ‘Tourists’, women characters protest at the racist and abusive language of their men. These are small and pointless gestures in a fictional world where language (and thinking) operate on the crudest level. Racial respect can hardly exist where there is no respect for language at all.

The particular possibilities of verbal language dominate the three final stories, titled ‘Porn’ 1, 2, and 3, where the filming of pornography is described in explicit detail, draining it of erotic force. Once again, Tsiolkas exhibits the discipline of a naturalist. He refuses to acknowledge any world beyond the physical and looks hard at sexual transgression without moral comment. In its way, this is admirable, but it makes for a severely confined literary art.

Poetry ‘cannot be an ark to help us survive the flood’, wrote Zbigniew Herbert in 1948: ‘It has to be our daily bread, an article of primary need.’ Nothing could be more truly said of Clive James’s approach to poetry. His latest assemblage of essays, reviews, and miscellanea, collected over the years that straddle his diagnosis of leukemia, feel necessary as oxygen. There is a quiet restlessness too: a sense of sorting papers into some final order.

To complement our popular ‘Books of the Year’ feature, to highlight ABR’s fast-expanding arts coverage, and to celebrate some excellent music, theatre, and film, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate some of their favourite productions of the year. 

Robyn Archer

Dawn Upshaw’s concerts with the Australian Chamber Orchestra were staggeringly beautiful. Conceived with an elegant and intelligent touch, they featured the Australian première of Maria Schneider’s song cycle Winter Morning Walks. Dawn Upshaw’s subtly nuanced and warmly generous performance made Australia’s finest ensemble even finer in that moment. It’s not just the best for the year, but the best in decades.

Dawn Upshaw (photograph by Patrick Ryan)

From the accomplished to the emerging. Grace Clifford’s performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra made me understand that, while I love the skill of AFL footballers, I have to admit that, at this level, the arts win hands down. So young, so gifted, so much hard-won skill, and delivered with such humility and real grace.

My next selection is Crossing Roper Bar, at the Australian National Museum. I first saw this collaboration between the Australian Art Orchestra and Wagilak-speaking songmen of South East Arnhem Land in 2005. Nine years later it had evolved into a moving partnership between tradition and contemporary improvisation. Few performances could better express the rare essence of Australian optimism than this.

Ben Brooker

Ursula Mills and Tim Walter in Kryptonite (photograph by Lisa Tomasetti)

Toneelgroep’s Roman Tragedies was, for many, Adelaide’s theatrical event of the year. Unfolding over six hours on an expanded and immersive Festival Theatre stage, this cycle of Shakespeare’s unofficial trilogy of Roman plays stunned with its innovativeness, the quality of its performances, and the power and precision of its streamlined text.

Rarely performed as a complete cycle, Philip Glass’s ‘Portrait Trilogy’ of operas – Akhnaten, Einstein on the Beach, and Satyagraha (State Opera of South Australia) – was a landmark. Directed by Leigh Warren and designed by Mary Moore, each opera was given a more minimalist and choreographic rendering than is usual. As with Glass’s music, the overall effect was hypnotic.

Sue Smith’s two-hander, Kryptonite was a highlight of this year’s State Theatre Company of South Australia’s season. The play charts, from 1989 to the present day, the relationship between environmentalist turned politician Dylan and Lian, a Chinese-Australian who becomes a powerful businessperson. Fine performances by Tim Walter and Ursula Mills did justice to Smith’s punchy script, which provides a compelling metaphor for the Sino-Australian relationship in the Asian Century.

Tim Byrne

Three productions emerged as highlights this year, even if only one can lay claim to an entirely Australian genesis. It’s interesting to note that all of them featured outstanding performances by female actors, and all came from the independent scene. The first was George Brant’s one-woman play Grounded, from Red Stitch. A layered and lyric exploration of a female fighter pilot’s struggle with drone technology, it showcased the extraordinary talent of Kate Cole, who captured the vertiginous descent of her character with virtuosic assurance.

The second was Kin Collective’s trilogy of plays by Martin McDonagh, known collectively as The Leenane Trilogy. A massive undertaking, it managed to encompass an entire world view, and featured a bravura turn by Noni Hazlehurst, among others.

Maude Davey (Harry Crawford) and Caroline Lee (Annie Burkettby) in The Trouble with Harry (photograph by Sarah Walker)

Finally, MKA produced the world première of Australian writer Lachlan Philpott’s stunning play The Trouble with Harry. It struck this reviewer as one of the finest plays this country has produced in years, and received a production to match. Performances were uniformly perfect, but special mention has to go to Maude Davey as the troubled Harry, and Caroline Lee as his tragically compromised wife.

Peter Craven

One of the finest performances I saw this year was Noni Hazlehurst’s as the mother in The Beauty Queen of Leenane, the revival of the whole of Martin McDonagh’s trilogy by the Kin Collective at fortyfivedownstairs was a highlight of the theatre calendar.

Robyn Nevin was also at the height of her powers as Ana in Neighbourhood Watch (Melbourne Theatre Company), and then there was the incomparable Miriam Margolyes in I’ll Eat You Last (Melbourne Theatre Company). Nadia Tass’s production of Annie Baker’s The Flick (which Red Stitch will revive in 2015) was a dazzling piece of work; all three lead actors, but especially Ngaire Dawn Fair, were staggeringly good.

Michala Banas, Noni Hazlehurst, Christopher Bunworth, Marg Downey, Mark Diaco, and James O’Connell in The Leenane trilogy (photograph by Lachlan Woods)

Sigrid Thornton was a riveting Blanche du Bois in Black Swan’s production of A Street Car Named Desire, and Nicki Shiels’s performance as Helena in Bell Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream made one long to see her as Rosalind and Viola.

Brendan Cowell’s The Sublime (Melbourne Theatre Company) was a revelation.

Long-form television brought its high and mighty achievements, none better than – not the second series of The Bridge, nor The Fall – Devil’s Playground (Foxtel), which was superbly acted and scripted and had a compositional grandeur as well as a dazzling unpredictability.

Brendan Gleeson in Calvary

In film, John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary deserved its high reputation, and both Stephen Knight’s Locke (with its tour de force performance from Tom Hardy) and Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure were exceptional.

NT Live’s broadcast of David Hare’s Skylight showed that Carey Mulligan is already one of the world’s great actresses, and I don’t ever expect to see The Marriage of Figaro done better than in the Metropolitan Opera’s production by Richard Eyre, with James Levine conducting that most moody and wonderstruck of operas.

Ian Dickson

The year produced two excellent films in that most fraught of genres, the artist biopic. In Reaching for the Moon, Miranda Otto made a febrile, stubborn, ultimately ruthless Elizabeth Bishop in a film that managed to avoid most of the pitfalls of the category. Mike Leigh’s Mr. Turner had Timothy Spall, a magnificent Turner, proving that he could get more mileage out of a grunt than most actors could from a two-page speech. But for me the film of the year was about a fictional artist, the failed actor, Aydin, the protagonist of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s majestic Winter Sleep.

A new work by Michael Gow is always an event, and Once in Royal David’s City (Belvoir) didn’t disappoint. The play was sensitively directed by Eamon Flack and superbly performed, especially by Brendan Cowell. Gow covered a wide range of themes. Death, the heartless inanity of late capitalist society, and the importance of art, especially theatre, in combattng this were viewed with Gow’s signature combination of rage and compassion.

Christine Goerke (Electra) in Elektra

David Robertson, the new musical director of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, is obviously not one to shy away from a challenge, and a semi-staged performance of Richard Strauss’s Elektra is certainly that. Christine Goerke’s astounding Electra, Lisa Gasteen’s deliciously creepy Clytemnestra, and Cheryl Barker’s lyrical Chrysothemis dominated the proceedings and allowed us to ignore the unnecessary dancers.

Andrew Fuhrmann

The stand-out theatre event in Melbourne this year was Red Stitch’s production of New York playwright Annie Baker’s The Flick. Directed by Nadia Tass, this was as good as anything the company has ever produced – a melancholic wonder.

Helen Morse as Anne in Dreamers (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Damien Ryan’s inspired adaptation of Henry V was the best thing I have seen from Bell Shakespeare since Lee Lewis’s Twelfth Night, while fortyfivedownstairs also had a strong year, highlighted by The Long Pigs, The Leenane Trilogy, and Daniel Keene’s Dreamers.

There were also a number of exciting, if ultimately frustrated, theatrical adventures worthy of mention: The Rabble’s Frankenstein, Peta Brady’s Ugly Mugs, and Chinese director Meng Jinghui’s anarchic Good Person of Szechuan, all at the Malthouse.

But none of it was as exciting as what we saw in the world of contemporary dance. The inaugural $30,000 Keir Choreographic Award created a huge buzz, with Atlanta Eke’s Body of Work a deserving winner. The scene has an inspiring energy at the moment, with so many young choreographers doing great work.

Then there was the Melbourne Festival’s comprehensive Trisha Brown retrospective, with the Trisha Brown Company presenting seventeen of the revolutionary choreographer’s works – a clear festival highlight.

Colin Golvan

The Australian Chamber Orchestra weekend at Tarrawarra Museum of Art is always a highlight of the concert year – an orchestra of great exuberance and finesse in a fabulous contemporary chamber setting.

The Melbourne Theatre Company production of Brendan Cowell’s The Sublime, a whoosh of a play set in the dark heartland of footballers and the sexual exploitation of young women.

Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood offered a serene piece of contemplation on family life and the passing of time.

Ellar Coltrane in Boyhood

Fiona Gruber

I really enjoyed seeing Patrick White’s pungent, gothic, and wonderfully wordy Night on Bald Mountain, a Malthouse Theatre production directed by Matthew Lutton, which marked the fiftieth anniversary of the play; Melita Jurisic as dipsomaniacal Miriam Sword, and Julie Forsyth as quaint Mrs Quodling with her goats, were particularly punchy.

Tilda Cobham-Hervey in 52 Tuesdays

I was very impressed by a film from Adelaide, 52 Tuesdays, directed by Sophie Hyde and starring the luminous Tilda Cobham-Hervey as a sixteen-year-old coming to terms with her mother’s gender reassignment and her own experiments in sex and socialising. It was witty, compassionate, and frank, and also a bold experiment in film-making

Third cab off the rank is Iain Grandage’s opera The Riders based on Tim Winton’s novel of the same name but with considerable liberties taken in the plot. In this powerful piece of musical writing and characterisation, Barry Ryan put in a fine performance as Winton’s innocent abroad, Scully. The Victorian Opera production in September was effective but a bit sparse. It would be nice to see it again with a bigger budget, unlikely though this is.

Alastair Jackson

Stuart Skelton (Otello) and Jonathan Summers (Iago) star in Otello (photograph by Alistair Muir)

To mark the 450^th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, English National Opera mounted a new production of Verdi’s Otello in September. Director David Alden changed the normally black-faced Moor into an assimilated Muslim-turned-Christian who led the Venetian forces against the Turks circa 1920s. Australian tenor Stuart Skelton, who had previously worked with Alden as Peter Grimes, was singing Otello for the first time and succeeded admirably in bringing the character to life. Desdemona was the rising American lyric soprano Leah Crocetto, making her UK début, and veteran Australian baritone Jonathan Summers was in fine form as the sinister Iago. Edward Gardner conducted superbly, and the audience responded accordingly.

Verdi’s Il Trovatore requires four great voices, and Teatro La Fenice had them in their October revival of Lorenzo Mariani’s production from 2011. Carmen Giannattasio, who had just completed an enormously successful season as Maria Stuarda at Covent Garden, was a magnificent Leonora. Sought-after American tenor Gregory Kunde sang Manrico, and Artur Rucinski, a true Verdi baritone, was a very convincing Count di Luna. Veronica Simeoni sang well as Azucena, but was not sufficiently dramatic. It didn’t help that she looked more like Manrico’s daughter than his mother. The highlight of the evening was the brilliant young Italian conductor Daniele Rustioni, a protégé of Antonio Papano, who almost stole the show in a masterly example of Verdian conducting.

Opera Australia opened its Melbourne Spring Season with splendid new production of Puccini’s Tosca. John Bell’s clever updating to Mussolini’s Italy worked well and brought out the inherent drama better than most other Toscas we have seen in Australia. The beautifully mounted production will serve the company well. Any changes are cogent and, like Tosca’s rather unorthodox exit in Act III, relevant to the time and place of the setting. Austrian soprano Martina Serafin was perfect as Tosca, both vocally and dramatically. She was ably supported by Mexican tenor Diego Torre as Cavaradossi, and Italian barirone Claudio Sgura was a suitably menacing Scarpia. Conductor Andrea Molina brought out a wonderful reading of the score by Orchestra Victoria.

Mary Lou Jelbart

There is an inexplicable attraction in a marathon cultural event, the urge to saturate body and mind in Wagner’s Ring or Peter Brook’s Mahabharata – or in my case, fourteen continuous hours of Schubert (the 3MBS 2014 fundraiser at ANAM). The heat and the uncomfortable were irrelevant as forty-five of our finest musicians played impromptus, song cycles, trios, quartets, and the pinnacle – the String Quintet, Schubert’s masterwork, composed just before his death. It was music-making of great beauty and poignancy.

Derek Ives in The Long Pigs

The Trouble with Harry, by Lachlan Philpott at Northcote Town Hall, overcame the difficult aural environment of the venue by equipping each audience member with headphones, and actors with head mikes. It was a device that worked brilliantly, making the tragic (true) story of ‘Harry’ extraordinarily intimate. Maude Davey gave one of the outstanding performances of the year as the transgender ‘Harry’. This was theatre-making of apparent simplicity but great skill, beautifully directed by Alyson Campbell.

Conflict of interest declaration! Clare Bartholomew, Derek Ives, and Nicci Wilks are the clowns of nightmares, and their disturbing, murderous, blasphemous, and cannibalistic clowns were a sensation in The Long Pigs (fortyfivedownstairs). Bartholomew was a merciless and controlling bully; Ives the hapless, crucified figure; and Wilks the indomitable miniature creature surviving against the odds. I was not the only one captivated by this strange, undefinable work, directed by Susie Dee, which has now been invited to numerous festivals here and overseas.

Valerie Lawson

Bangarra Dance Theatre's Patyegarang

It’s been the year of the guest artist, with both the Australian Ballet and Queensland Ballet adding the sparkle (and box office draw card) of some outstanding artists. Highlights included the Australian Ballet’s guests: Gillian Murphy, a principal with American Ballet Theatre, dancing in La Bayadère, and Alina Cojocaru (English National Ballet) with Johan Kobborg (formerly a principal with the Royal Ballet) in Manon.

Tamara Rojo (English National Ballet) was exceptional in the Queensland Ballet’s production of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet. The company’s performance marked the first time MacMillan’s 1965 production was staged in Australia.

For the interesting range of principal dancers and their outstanding artistry, the most impressive visiting company was American Ballet Theatre. The company’s triple bill Bach Partita, Seven Sonatas, and Fancy Free was the highlight of ABT’s Brisbane season.

Bangarra Dance Theatre celebrated its quarter century with Patyegarang, a visually stunning new work by the company’s artistic director, Stephen Page.

Wayne McGregor’s Chroma entered and enlivened the Australian Ballet’s repertoire.

Dancing at the Australian Dance Awards gala in Sydney, Kristina Chan once again demonstrated her artistry in her solo work, Crestfallen.

Brian McFarlane

In a provocative year for Australian films were two conspicuously tough-minded pieces. After Animal Kingdom’s critical success in 2010, expectations for director David Michôd’s new film, The Rover, were high, and were convincingly met. It works as a gripping thriller, but is more than that: it is a riveting study of two minds coming to terms with each other; is interested in the workings and repercussions of violence; and makes most unsettling use of Australian landscape.

Guy Pearce and Robert Pattinson in The Rover

In Tony Mahony and Angus Sampson’s The Mule, much of the action is confined to a bleak motel where the naïve young eponym is watched over by a pair of brutal detectives waiting for him to excrete drugs ingested in Thailand. Not a pretty idea, but powerful stuff depicting an ugly trade for the vile thing it is. The US film of the year is Gone Girl (Boyhood offered stiff competition), again holding interest throughout as a thriller but its real substance lying elsewhere. Director David Fincher and screenwriter Gillian Flynn (adapting her own novel) have compelled attention to the dynamics of a marital mismatching, to the persuasively workmanlike police search for the girl (‘gone’ in several ways), and to the often-obstructive behaviour of the media.

Michael Morley

Behzod Abduraimov

I am doubtless not the only viewer who thought that Richard Linklater, the director of Boyhood, had found some magical way of compressing time – from the film’s almost three hours’ running running time to what felt like barely ninety minutes. Shot over twelve years, with the same actors ageing in accordance with the film’s (fictional) storyline, Boyhood plays like a series of Chekhovian episodes covering days and years in the lives and confusions of a generation of characters. As one critic observed, the film-maker and his cast found a way of presenting scenes that follow the rhythm of life. Haunting, funny, and worth watching not twice, but three or four times.

There were two standout musical performances this year in Adelaide: the return of the remarkable young Tashkenti pianist Behzod Abduraimov, whose fresh-minted, non-hyperbolic account of that warhorse known as Rach Three (Adelaide Symphony Orchestra) managed to persuade most listeners that it is a far better piece than it usually sounds; and the sixteen-year-old Young Performer of the Year, Grace Clifford, whose performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto was not just spectacular for its technical accuracy and poise, but also for the maturity and vitality of her interpretation. She is clearly a star in the making. 

Peter Rose

Maria Mercedes is Maria Callas in Master Class (photograph courtesy of fortyfivedownstairs)

In opera, it was hard not to be stirred by Jonathan Kent’s new Manon Lescaut at Covent Garden, with Jonas Kaufmann in mighty voice not long before his sensational concerts for Opera Australia – a commanding singer at the height of his powers. Best of the local fare was David McVicar’s new production of Don Giovanni for Opera Australia, which brought perspective and gravitas to the tiny Sydney stage, and highlighted a prodigious Australian talent, Nicole Car.

Melbourne saw consummate performances from Maria Mercedes as Maria Callas in Terence McNally’s Master Class (fortyfivedownstairs) and Miriam Margoyles as Sue Mengers in John Logan’s I’ll East You Last (MTC). McNally’s 1993 study in divadom is better than Logan’s biographical play (should we really be guffawing about the skulls of Cambodia in 2014?). Maria Mercedes was unforgettable as Callas, and I am sure she will be again next September, when she reprises the role.

I loved two emphatically different films, Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, which brought a Nouvelle Vague insouciance to Rome; and Pantelis Voulgaris’s Little England, a beautifully acted family melodrama which rightly opened the Greek Film Festival.

Dina Ross

Lee Mason and Christopher Bunworth in East

Both my choices are ensemble productions with casts of six or more, and they bookend a year in theatre. Black Water Theatre Company’s production of Steven Berkoff’s East was a stand-out, with director Peta Hanrahan milking every scene for physical comedy and brash, in-your-face irreverence. In November, the Keene-Taylor Theatre Project reunited after a long hiatus with Daniel Keene’s melancholic Dreamers. This play, which tackled racism, ageism, and idealism with poetic flair, suffered from an abrupt and unsatisfactory ending, but still demonstrated what can be achieved when superlative writing, acting, and directing combine to create magic on stage.

Eloise Ross

Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is an adaptation of Michel Faber’s novel of the same name, written in 2000, and incorporates some of the mysterious and sinister science fiction elements from its source material. Scarlett Johansson’s performance as an alien-like creature, partly improvised, is at once isolating and wholly involving. The films wraps its strikingly dark visual palette in a chilling soundscape and an intriguing experimental score by Mica Levi.

Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston in Only Lovers Left Alive

Ari Folman’s The Congress is an ambitious mixture of live-action and animation that warily imagines a future of film production without actors. Robin Wright stars as a parallel version of herself who eventually submits to having her body and all its expressions digitised for the film studio’s archive. Adapted from Stanisław Lem’s novel The Futurological Congress (1971), the film is visually spectacular, embracing the widescreen format and revelling in the possibilities of the cinema.

Only Lovers Left Alive is a vampire film steeped in director Jim Jarmusch’s particular brand of laconic cool. Tilda Swinton and Tom Hiddleston, both embracing their androgynous sensuality, are centuries-old soul mates, separated and then reunited in Detroit and Tangiers. It features a script filled with sharp literary allusions, and an irresistible soundtrack, including music from Jarmusch’s band SQÜRL.

The Iranian film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Ana Lily Amirpour) shares influences with Jarmusch and will be a valuable entry to the realm of vampiric fiction.

Mary Vallentine

The title The Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland by Ridiculusmus sounds more like a lecture than a play. Created by David Woods and Jon Haynes, this ambitious, funny, and moving piece consists of two plays, with the same characters performed simultaneously. Two audience groups sit opposite each with two acting spaces dividing them. We could hear bits of the other play, which were texturally woven with our play. Several characters moved between the two. The effect was a polyphonic soundscape portraying a world where auditory hallucination was the norm. By entering this world, we empathised and engaged. Open Dialogue, an early intervention treatment program for schizophrenia, has eradicated the disease in Finnish western Lapland in the twenty years since it began. Open Dialogues treats uncertainty and polyphonic voices as normal. While clearly informing this theatrical realisation, it is the plays’ effect on the audience that presents the most compelling case for compassion and for advocating the adoption of this treatment.

PLEXUS – comprised of Monica Curro (violin), Phillip Arkinstall ( clarinet), and Stefan Cassomenos (piano) – performs music commissioned from Australian composers. So far they have given twenty-two premières, with another twenty or so slated for next year. Their first concert had us on the edge of our seats as we experienced the excitement of hearing six premières. The ‘sandwich’ principle of a short, obligatory new Oz comp wedged between two standard repertoire pieces did not apply here. These champions of the new engaged us in their adventure and it was thrilling. Fortyfivedownstairs, the Salon at Melbourne Recital Centre, and Port Fairy Festival have each hosted concerts by PLEXUS since its formation this year.

Jordi Savall’s Jerusalem is not Australian. It was too great and humane an experience to ignore, however. The music inspired by this city across different faiths was overwhelming. We all left Melbourne Recital Centre convinced – at least for that one night – that peace in the Middle East was achievable.

Jake Wilson

The Babadook

In a better-than-average year for Australian cinema, Rolf de Heer made his best film in Charlie’s Country, an enraged but unsentimental parable about the ruin of indigenous cultures, with David Gulpilil – who deserves the label ‘national treasure’ if anyone does – in a role that amounts to his King Lear.

The other local standout was Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook, a textbook demonstration of the most frequently overlooked principle of horror film-making: a director who can make us believe her characters are real people will be able to deliver infinitely more effective scares.

For those who were able to attend the Melbourne International Film Festival, the cinematic event of the year was the second-ever Australian screening of Out 1 (1971) Jacques Rivette’s legendary improvised serial about theatre, conspiracy, and mental illness, conceived as a sinister scavenger hunt or a chess game with Paris as the board. Running for nearly thirteen hours, this puts most subsequent examples of long-form moving-image storytelling in the shade.

If you think of writers as constructors, then Hilary Mantel is surely a builder of cathedrals. Two cathedrals, in fact: her two Man Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and his England, Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012), are soaring, intricate, and gigantic. And there is another cathedral, a third in the trilogy, on the way. Vast as these enterprises are, Mantel can also do small and beautiful: here are ten lustrous short stories to prove it. I can’t think of any kind of architecture that compares. They seem more like a string of dark pearls.

Even a cursory knowledge of Mantel and her long literary career and sometimes difficult life will uncover autobiographical elements in these stories. The first, ‘Sorry to Disturb’, is about an Englishwoman trying to write a novel at home in Jeddah, where her husband works, when suddenly the doorbell rings.

Mantel has already written both a memoir and a novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), based on her four years in Saudi Arabia, but, as this story shows, she is still digging up fertile material from that ghastly, claustrophobic period in her life, and here the narrator uses the local restrictions on the lives of women as an excuse for some questionable behaviour towards her unexpected visitor. There is a nudge to the reader: the narrator sends off her novel to a London literary agent in William IV Street, and the book’s dedication is: ‘To Bill Hamilton, the man in William IV Street: thirty years on, with gratitude.’

We are not surprised, then, when another story, ‘How Shall I Know You?’, is about an older, grumpier author, ‘lost and drifting’, plagued a by mysterious illness, going to talk to a literary society ‘of the sort that must have been old-fashioned when the previous century closed’. Naturally, the society puts her up in a hideous hotel: ‘I stood and breathed in – because one must breathe – tar of ten thousand cigarettes, fat of ten thousand breakfasts, the leaking metal seep of a thousand shaving cuts, and the horse-chestnut whiff of nocturnal emissions.’ (I hope that these days a double Man Booker prize winner gets to stay in rose-scented splendour).

Hilary Mantel

The title story springs from a fantasy that Mantel confessed in an interview: in 1983 she looked out of the window of her Windsor flat and saw the prime minister, whom she hated, walking unguarded in the hospital gardens next door. What if she had had a gun?

And yet the fascination in these stories doesn’t come from the real events that might have inspired them (if you want more of those, read Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost, 2003). It comes from what she has invented, with this material as her starting point. For example, the narrator in ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ is the woman who lives in that same Windsor flat, but she isn’t the assassin. Will she go along with the man who gains entrance by pretending to be a plumber, or will she dob him in? Will he kill her as well as Mrs Thatcher? The setup is a thriller, but the result is very different.

With a wry, sardonic wit, Mantel constructs stories about guilt, complicity in wickedness, regret, painful revelation, or the pursuit of elusive enlightenment. The effect ranges from odd to downright macabre, but it is always unsettling. She is particularly good at evoking mild disgust: ‘a wash of light ran over the carpet like sun-warmed margarine’. Which is not to say these stories are totally grim. They are funniest when they let rip. ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ is droll, exhilarating, and savagely gleeful, despite teetering on the edge of imminent death; and ‘Harley Street’ is delightful, a sly story of office shenanigans that I had to read twice to be sure what it was really about – and that is a compliment.

Several stories feature a heartbreaking and horrifying object of pity: an anorexic girl, a woman having a heart attack, a deformed young woman, an indistinct monstrosity in a wheelchair. Even just reading about them, you feel like a ghoul. But the focus is not on the pitiful person but on the observers, whose defence is frequently to be pitiless, and their colluders. People like the child Mary Joplin in ‘The Comma’, ‘smirking, scratching herself under her frock, and she would stick her tongue out at me until it was stretched to the root’. ‘How Shall I Know You?’, my favourite story, develops the idea furthest and introduces a particularly painful twist. You admire, even as you squirm.

There are hints of the surreal and supernatural, as in the lovely conclusion to the harrowing ‘The Heart Fails Without Warning’, and in ‘Terminus’, a story about the dead among us, which echoes the swarm of querulous shades in Mantel’s novel about a medium, Beyond Black (2005). But most of the beauties and chills are real. Apart from ‘Terminus’, these are ghost stories without ghosts.

My second-favourite story is ‘Sorry to Disturb’, where the narrator wonders if Jeddah set her off-kilter, condemned to see life skewed. It sets the tone for the whole collection in its conclusion: ‘I do not know, when I turn out the lights at night, whether the house is quiet as I left it or the furniture is frolicking in the dark.’

If this is life skewed, I find it both worrying and enticing. As Mrs Thatcher once commanded: Rejoice.

There was something of the alchemist in Albert Namatjira. Using the most liquescent of media, he created impressions of the driest terrain. Painting in watercolour involves the fluid dispersal of pigment. Yet in Namatjira we find colours distilled in such a way that each landscape glows with a quiet intensity. This evocation of light reveals the influence of Rex Battarbee, who, long before he began to tutor his famous protégé, voiced dissatisfaction with ‘traditional methods’. He developed a painting technique of his own, specifically designed to ‘achieve luminosity’. Like many an inventor, he was cautious about sharing his discovery, in part because he believed that artists should develop on their own terms. But Namatjira was so keen an observer of his then master that he would have realised if Battarbee had withheld information. So Rex decided to teach him everything he knew, both for the sake of Namatjira, whom he clearly adored, and more generally and altruistically ‘for the sake of the Aborigines’.

The cover assembles the book’s title and author’s name (writ very large) with a photograph of him, in an art gallery, before a wide yellow landscape by Fred Williams. Turning to the viewer, Patrick McCaughey is about to launch into a story that will satisfy the curiosity teased by the name of the book, Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters.

I first encountered Patrick in the early 1970s, when the brothers McCaughey lectured, one following the other in adjacent lecture theatres at Melbourne University, James reading Homer’s Iliad and Patrick outlining the story of modern art. Leaping on top of the podium, James dramatised the soap operatics and petty feuds of the Greek gods. Descending to platform level, he enacted the bickering of muscle-bound Greek heroes as they hung about, bored and underemployed, in their camp outside the walls of Troy. Heroism resounds in every line of the Iliad: an achievement of poetry and of mnemonic aura, and rather clearly not the thrill roused by the drum of a historical inevitability as self-fulfilling as the laws of physics.

Forget the cliché about a week being a long time in politics. Two decades in this super-speed, globalised age is more than enough time, it seems, for even the ‘best’ political system to go pear-shaped.

A growing number of books in recent times have focused on the current travails of Western-style liberal democracy. Its litany of dysfunctions includes corrosive money politics, policy gridlock, and growing citizen uninterest. But it is Francis Fukuyama’s new book that best symbolises the current Zeitgeist of dashed hopes concerning the resilience of the West’s political system.

Georgie heard it too. On the very first morning of this story, though so much had gone beforehand. The usual warbling of the typical magpies, if anything so mysteriously complex as a magpie’s song can be called typical. There she’d lie, day after day, alongside Muir in their countless beds, in cramped corner flats and large creaking homesteads, in cold fibro shacks and bedsits baking for the lack of ventilation, listening to the warbling giving birth to the light upon its loom: the many coloured strands of light that, no matter where they were, began each ordinary day. Muir would hurrumph in bed – he was a cranky sleeper; he dreamt of his novels’ characters, he told her, was not to be disturbed, except for sex – his thick freckled shoulder would rise against her and she would sigh and listen, to the coming of the light, until it was eventually strong enough for her to muster the energy and get the kids ready for school. More often than not it was a new school.

But here, in this two-bedroom bungalow on the inlet, with its boxy kitchen and only one wall big enough to hang Muir’s portraits the way he liked, she’d heard it too. The way the subsong of the day had changed, the way it was different then.

As usual they’d arrived at night and nothing could be seen, but in the morning the eldest two, Gus and Jo, had found the yard was flat, there was a cubby out the front, a barbecue made out of beachstones, a towering woodpile too, a flowering gum with a rope swing, the freedom to call and roam. They were straight out amongst it, running the corduroy paths with milk lipsticks and marmalade on their tops, breasting the air. But the youngest, Mossy, did not emerge. When she went in to stroke his head and see if he was sick or sad he only looked up at her and said, the magpie sings a song here Mamma.

Why is it that women with supportive partners are still thought of as lucky, as if they have won a lottery? In the winter of 2012, Annabel Crabb ran into Tanya Plibersek, who had raised three children over the course of a successful parliamentary career with the help of her husband, a senior state bureaucrat. When Crabb commented on how fortunate they were to have helpful spouses, Plibersek replied, with characteristic dry wit, that she sincerely hoped they would be the last generation who needed to feel lucky about that.

We know that Australian women comprise about sixty per cent of university graduates. In middle management, their numbers are similar to those of men. Yet at the apex, women are still absent: only ten per cent hold executive positions, and only two or three per cent are CEOs. Theories abound as to why: women need to ‘lean in’; they suffer from the ‘confidence gap’; the corporate glass ceiling remains intact. None of these is necessarily untrue, but, according to Crabb, the real issue is not what takes place within the office but rather what happens outside.

‘Lending printed eloquence to a poem’ comes from ‘Alas’, Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s elegiac tribute to Seamus Heaney. There is eloquence aplenty in this fine collection of more than a hundred and twenty poems edited by poet Geoff Page, someone who understands that eloquence speaks in many tones and in various formal structures. This variety is generously represented here, even if, as a result of Page’s allegiance to ‘a broad church’ of Australian poetry and his wish to represent its full range of tendencies in a way that will speak to a congregation of ‘average reader[s]’, the collection treads lightly in the realm of experimental or avant-garde poetry.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Shakespeare, Donne, Emily Brontë, Dickinson, Hopkins, Hardy, Rilke, Dylan Thomas, Roethke, Plath, Hughes, Heaney, Judith Wright.

Are poems ‘inspired’ or mainly the work of craft?

Both. Craft alone might produce what is called verse, but without an inspired element it would be dull. Inspiration alone might wing it, but can also be pretty dull for the reader.

Why do you write?

Because I always have. I seem to have had no choice in the matter, for which I’m usually grateful.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I am, and I remember my dreams, although I’ve never written about them. They’re usually transparent variations on the same anxious themes, but every so often something extraordinary occurs and I enjoy being reminded of the brain’s strangeness.

 Where are you happiest?

Newly arrived in an unknown city. Within sight of hills or the sea. In my parents’ Sydney garden. Walking in the Lake District and coming home to tea, a fire, and a manuscript. And at the Salt Lick, a barbecue restaurant just outside Austin, Texas.

Rupert (‘Dick’) Hamer proved to be one of Australia’s most innovative premiers. One sign of his unusual prestige is that this history of his life and times has perhaps been publicly praised more by Labor leaders than by his own Liberal colleagues.

Hamer’s family background was in the church, law, business, and politics. His paternal grandfather was the minister of the wealthy Independent Church (now called St Michael’s) on Collins Street, where he was distinguished for his highbrow sermons and the astonishingly high salary he received. Hamer was born in 1916 and was formally christened Rupert after a relative who had died at Gallipoli the previous year. He was a studious boarder at Geelong Grammar, eventually winning first class honours in three languages – Latin, French, and Ancient Greek. A school friend described him as never ‘fussed or flustered’. Those qualities remained with him. He could come home to suburban Canterbury after a turbulent week in parliament and sleep like a rock, then dig happily in the garden next morning.

Once, when it was the beginning of the dry but no one could have known it yet, Dad drove us west – out past ‘Jesus Saves’ signs nailed to box trees, past unmarked massacre sites and slumping woolsheds, past meatworks and red-bricked citrus factories with smashed windows, and past one-servo towns with faded ads for soft drinks no one makes anymore – until we reached a cotton farm.

We stood on the old floodplain listening to the manager in his American cap, a battery of pumps and pipes behind him, boasting how much water these engines could lift once the river reached a certain height. To the left, an open channel cut through laser-levelled fields to the horizon.

Cotton saved the towns out here in the 1990s, but to me it just looked desolate. These weren’t the plains I knew. Back in Dubbo, I spoke to a local businessman about how folk downstream reckoned the chemicals were harming their children, and how the riverine plains were all cleared, and how graziers cried in front of strangers, blaming irrigators for taking their water, and about the rivers left emaciated and growing little else but toxic algae. He smiled, reached towards my shoulder, and rubbed the sleeve of my green T-shirt between his fingers. ‘Everyone needs cotton, mate,’ he said. When I tried to continue, he cut in. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing out there anyway.’

High dungeon was a feeling I knew well
When mockery from men weighed on my soul.
As your Prime Minister I went through hell,
If I can say so without hyperbowl.

Triumphant now in power, the men of hate
Who howled that I was unfit for command
Make prejudice a tenant of the state.
Don’t speak to me about the Taliband:

In modern Australia, politics and public policy appear to reflect a narrow range of managerial, political, and economic opinions. Even the much publicised ‘listening tours’ conducted by politicians seem designed to show that they are sensitive to community concerns, but not so sensitive as to want to change policy direction. What makes current discussion of political issues so dispiriting is that over the last three decades, economic measurements and business ideas have come to dominate public life. Citizens are now treated by the public service and their masters as ‘consumers’, former public goods such as education are now narrowly viewed as a form of economic productivity, and community service providers, such as Australia Post, are written about in the media as mere businesses ripe for privatisation. Between 2007 and 2010, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd gave the impression that he might become the ‘circuit breaker’: a leader whose professed faith in the potential for government intervention and community consultation might lead to a more engaged and empowered citizenry, as well as a government more in tune with the needs of the electorate.

Guy Rundle ends his engrossing account of Clive Palmer with a disclaimer: ‘Knowing Clive, he will contradict everything asserted in this essay in the two weeks between its going to press and hitting the bookstands.’ Since the publication of this essay, Palmer has not contradicted the assertions of the essay, but his party has been challenged. Senator Jacqui Lambie has resigned from the Palmer United Party. At the November Victorian election, preference deals led to the election of micro parties to the Upper House, without a Palmer United Party member.

Rundle’s essay gives a balanced account of Palmer’s recent political activity and personal story. Rundle writes with the confidence of a close observer, marking early what he sees as the ‘moral seriousness’ of Palmer’s purpose. Rundle claims a solitary achievement in noticing that Palmer has any purpose at all. He castigates the Murdoch and Fairfax presses for their ridiculing of Palmer, suggesting they and the wider commentariat overlook his significance because they are locked into the old politics of two main parties with a third minor party holding the balance of power in the Senate.

It is a brave author who produces a book proclaiming the usefulness of war at a time when most of us are thinking about the horrors and wastefulness of World War I. Ian Morris, British by birth but now the Willard Professor of Classics at Stanford, and author of Why The West Rules – For Now (2010), has done just that and is receiving praise for his efforts. What are the merits of his case?

Morris, an archaeologist and ancient historian, grounds his argument on the observation that, over the long term, the rate of human deaths in war has declined. The essence of his argument is: ‘War makes the state, and the state makes peace.’ He traces the development of human communities from tribal groupings to agriculturally based settled groups, through to aristocratically ruled societies, then to oligarchies, and more recently to democracies. With a wide-ranging analysis of wars and warfare over the past ten thousand years, he builds up the evidence for his argument. With each new stage of social development, from tribes through to democracies, the level of violence that people have had to endure has actually decreased. Despite the huge numbers of casualties that individual conflicts, particularly the two world wars, have caused, the overall proportions of violent to non-violent deaths have declined significantly.

Reading about the ‘khaki election’ of 1914 in Douglas Newton’s Hell-Bent evokes a sense of déjà vu in 2014, as Australia embarks on another war in the Middle East. During the campaign of 1914, Prime Minister Joseph Cook and Labor leader Andrew Fisher jostled to prove their loyalty to Britain and their enthusiasm for the impending war. Fisher’s efforts to match and outdo the conservative leader for patriotism bring to mind Opposition Leader Bill Shorten’s willingness to support the government’s military engagement in Syria and Iraq, and its amendments to national security laws. Plus ça change …

Hell-Bent takes as its subject one of the few chapters in Australia’s military history that has received little close attention: the nation’s decision to go to war in August 1914. The study goes some way to correcting the nationalist myopia that leads Australians to the belief that their history began with a beachhead on an isolated Turkish peninsula on 25 April 1915. Newton, a retired academic historian, uses the records of the British and Australian governments and the personal papers of political and other leaders to illuminate a moment in history before the Anzac acronym was coined and before the nation was given its ‘martial baptism’ at Gallipoli. Newton’s lively and beautifully crafted prose takes the reader back and forth between Melbourne, Sydney, and London during the countdown to war.

Jackie French, according to the press release for her new adult novel To Love a Sunburnt Country, has written over 140 books in a twenty-five-year career. Many are for children and teenagers. I have only read one other, A Waltz for Matilda (2012), the first in ‘the Matilda Saga’ for teens; but these two books share at least one character and several characteristics.

One of these is size − they both fall only a little shy of 500 pages − and another is that both plunder Australian popular verse: the second and third of the Matilda saga are titled The Girl from Snowy River (2012) and The Road to Gundagai (2013) respectively. All are set in and around the fictional New South Wales town of Gibber’s Creek. Matilda herself, the daughter of ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s jolly swagman, is the mother of the heroine’s love interest in this new novel, young Michael Thompson. And the heroine? She is none other than Nancy of the Overflow, the granddaughter of Clancy of that ilk. This Disney-like Australian outback pastiche portends a cheerful banality which sits awkwardly with the grim wartime theme of the latest book. (Dorothea Mackellar, despite providing the title, the tag-line – ‘All you who have not loved her, you will not understand …’ – and the all-pervading sentiment, doesn’t enter the story.)

There is a quality in James Ellroy’s fiction that evades analysis and exceeds his popular status as a successful author in the ‘crime genre’. This quality is in part connected to his demanding narratives, which inevitably leave one with the nagging feeling that there is a great deal one has failed to understand, and which prompt (often multiple) re-readings of his novels; but it is also connected to his stylistic and structural development, an aspect of his work that is generally ignored.

Ellroy’s reputation as a ‘noir’ stylist is well established, mainly on the basis of his vaunted LA Quartet of novels, published between 1987 and 1993. Since then, Ellroy has completed the Underworld USA trilogy, an epic cycle of historical crime novels that has driven his stylistic development far beyond the humble literary ambitions those early works represented. These later titles, American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood’s a Rover (2009), are rich, complex, and sometimes confounding novels that give a sense that Ellroy is a writer altogether too singular, and perhaps even too intelligent, to really be successful within the framework of any genre.

Anyone who has lived in Sydney’s inner west will recognise the terrain of Springtime: gardens redolent of mystery and decay, shabbiness, unexpected vistas, and streets that Michelle de Kretser describes as running ‘everywhere like something spilled’.

Frances has moved to Sydney with Charlie, who has left his wife and son Luke behind in Melbourne. Luke’s occasional visits fuel Frances’s uncertainty with intimations of a shared family history from which she feels excluded. She walks Rod, the timid dog she rescued from the pound, and muses on the vagaries of her situation, her fears and failings.

The authors of the stories in Breaking Beauty are graduates of the University of Adelaide, which Brian Castro (a professor there) reminds us in his introduction is ‘the first and best creative writing college in the country’. However, as an advertisement for creative writing at Adelaide University, this collection has limited success. While the contributors’ biographical notes are impressive – most have published a book, and there are winners of major national awards – the quality of the stories is uneven. J.M. Coetzee’s testimonial points to this with his focus on ‘the best of the writers in this collection [who] take us outside our comfortable selves’. Indeed, some of the best – like Stefan Laszczuk’s ‘The Window Winder’ with its image of decapitated heads kissing, Sean Williams’s ‘The Beholders’ as a clever Twilight Zone-esque tale of aesthetics, and Katherine Arguile’s beautiful ‘Wabi Sabi’ with its magical realist components – are masterful explorations of the uncanny.

Crow Mellow, the sixth novel by Julian Davies, centres on a bush retreat where a millionaire couple gathers artists to share around ideas. From an optimistic standpoint, the retreat is a salon. Viewed differently, all parties are engaged in a status grab: artists ‘came from the cities of the east coast to score … the kudos of being there when their colleagues weren’t’. For the millionaires, collecting artists has its own benefits.

Evan Jones’s Selected Poems is more than timely: its author was born in 1931. In an introduction (or ‘Personal Appreciation’), fellow Melbourne poet Alex Skovron complains that ‘Evan’s work has not always received the attention it deserves, especially in recent years’. It is worth pausing a moment to consider why this should be so.

Jones is one of several highly talented poets associated with the English Department at the University of Melbourne a few decades ago. Others include Chris Wallace-Crabbe (b. 1934), Peter Steele (1939–2012), and Vincent Buckley (1929–88). All of them worked in the shadow of A.D. Hope and James McAuley, most had a more than passing interest in politics (local and foreign), and all, in their earlier years at least, used metre and rhyme extensively.

In his November 2010 lecture delivered as Oxford Professor of Poetry, Geoffrey Hill tested the idea that poetry might constitute a form of perjury. He acknowledged that ‘this is a deeply pessimistic view: many would say anachronistic’. Showing that language is an imperfect and even fallen medium which presents moral hazards to its users was not, however, the session’s most challenging proposition. More confronting was the suggestion that poetic language belongs to the category of perjury in particular, rather than to a more general category of ‘the lie’ or ‘the misleading remark’. Perjury is not simply lying but lying under oath: in Hill’s equation, poetry becomes oath-bound utterance. If, as he puts it later in the lecture, his ‘opinions on the matter of poetry … are decidedly peculiar’, it is because of this suggestion that poetic language bears such juridical weight. Whether poets might assume unspoken oaths; whether, more broadly, poetic speech necessarily holds civic consequences, is an urgently explicit question in his current work and one of the tensions animating both the context and the content of Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012.

Libby Hart’s new collection is ornate and knotty in a way that the reader would never divine from its cover, which is clear and white, with ‘wild’ in plain green typescript. It is essentially a bestiary, with birds of all kinds, as well as other creatures, including humans, in wild places, blown by winds and salt spray, or bringing wildness to ‘settled’ human habitations. There is a kind of emulsion of the direct and the opaque in her style that makes the mythic, fabulous elements appear to flow out of nature, directly, but in fact it is more as if we were in a wunderkammer of natural history, where the labels on the exhibits go beyond the call of duty and try to tell us everything about everything.

Two thirds of the way into Lyndall Gordon’s part memoir, part maternal biography, there is an episode of profound risk to the self. At the age of twenty-four, having recently moved from Cape Town to New York, Gordon is being treated for post-partum depression. This is 1966. Electro-convulsive therapy seems not to have helped, and her psychiatrist is urging longer-term treatment in an asylum in order to turn her – so it seems to Gordon – into the self-sacrificing wife and mother her own mother had wished her to be. Her husband, who has hitherto supported Dr Kay, makes a sudden turn. ‘Do something with your life … I’ve always thought you could write biography.’

Shakespeare was commonly regarded by his Romantic admirers as a solitary figure, whose prodigious talents were linked in some mysterious fashion to his isolation from society and from his fellow writers. ‘Shakespeare,’ wrote Coleridge in 1834, ‘is of no age – nor, I might add, of any religion, or party, or profession. The body and substance of his works came out of the unfathomable substance of his own oceanic mind.’ Carlyle thought likewise; Shakespeare, he believed, dwelt ‘apart, in a kind of royal solitude; none equal, none second’ to his creative powers.

This view of Shakespeare as a remote and solitary genius scarcely matches the known evidence. There were plenty of other remarkable writers in his day (for a start) from whose work he learnt and borrowed, and against whom he needed always to sharpen his wits. The profession to which he belonged depended essentially, moreover, on teamwork, as writers, players, sharers, carpenters, tire-men, scribes, book-holders, and other playhouse hands conferred and negotiated, adjusting their ideas to meet the conditions of performance, the expectations of their audiences, and each other’s better suggestions. So, far from brooding constantly apart, Shakespeare throughout most of his professional career thus worked – as Bart van Es in a recent studyhas aptly put it – in company (Shakespeare in Company, 2013); often, as the evidence of the present volume makes clear, in collaboration with a variety of fellow writers.

When we look back at the major cultural achievements of the early twenty-first century, The Sopranos (1999–2004) will surely prowl, thuggish, at the top of the list. Created by David Chase, the HBO drama tells the story of Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob boss who tries to balance the violent demands of his professional life with a more quotidian existence as a father and husband in the suburbs. Tony’s treatment for panic attacks by the psychiatrist Dr Jennifer Melfi is central to the six seasons. Self-described as a ‘fat fuckin crook from New Jersey’, Tony Soprano is more than that: a multi-layered, deeply flawed, always fascinating creature of millennial capitalist America.

In the world of Australian popular entertainment, few personalities are more prominent than Bert Newton. Since the 1950s he has been a presence on radio and television, as announcer, talk show host, compère, interviewer, and musical comedy star. Love him or loathe him, ‘Old Moonface’ has impressed as much for his ability to survive the ups and downs of showbiz politics as for his body of work. Whatever fate has thrown at him, he has risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes until the expiration of his Channel Nine contract earlier this year. Graeme Blundell’s biography attempts to reveal the man behind the flashing smile and famously quick wit. He draws on news reports, personal interviews with Newton’s colleagues and friends, as well as extracts from articles and television programs, to build a composite picture of a media celebrity.

As a child growing up Catholic in the late 1960s, I wore a black lacy veil over my hair to church every Sunday. After losing my religion sometime in my mid-teens, I had forgotten about this veil wearing until I found myself arguing with far too many people about the ‘burqa ban’. The general vitriol, together with the presumptions many people hold about Muslim women in particular, and Islam more generally, make me wonder how veiling has generated such significance in everyday life, national policy, and foreign affairs.

Paul Roberts’s The Impulse Society is the latest entry in a now familiar subtype of polemic: that of the society in decline, the symptoms of which run the gamut of Western post-industrialist ills from childhood obesity to the meltdown of global economic markets, and the syndrome of which is, at root, advanced capitalism. The lineage can be traced back through, among many others, Chris Hedges’ Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) and Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle (1967).

Like those similarly waspish and wide-ranging treatises, The Impulse Society emerges from its author’s deep unease with the deleterious effects of capitalism on Western social relations. Roberts’s catch-all hypothesis (all books of this kind need one for their polemical force) is that an all-pervasive, technology-driven myopia is fuelling an excess of self-interest and short-term thinking that is corroding society at virtually every level. Accordingly, governments can’t lift their heads above three-year electoral cycles, corporations above immediate (and inflated) rewards for executives and shareholders, or individuals above the hyper-efficient fulfilment of their own material and spiritual aspirations. ‘If the Impulse Society were a country,’ Roberts muses, ‘its flag would bear the picture of someone looking through the wrong end of a telescope.’

The white explorers who first penetrated the interior of this continent were exceptional men. White Australians of the time considered them heroes, performing an essential role in identifying opportunities for exploitation, settlement, and commerce. Mostly, the explorers were heroic – determined, tough, single-minded, and stoic in the face of enormous hardship. They also needed bushcraft, that elusive ability to ‘read’ the landscape, the weather, vegetation communities, and animal behaviour, so as to improve the quality of the daily judgements needed for survival. Success under these conditions requires a clear vision and a strong, intelligent, and organised leader. John McDouall Stuart and Augustus Gregory come to mind as examples; Robert O’Hara Burke does not.

In 1860, just weeks before this, the largest – and supposedly best-equipped – exploration party was due to leave Melbourne, Burke was appointed leader of the Victorian Exploring Expedition (aka Burke and Wills). Its task was to determine the nature of the country between that already traversed in the 1840s by Charles Sturt (essentially the Lake Eyre basin) and Ludwig Leichhardt (south of the Gulf of Carpentaria). As has become well known, aspects of the expedition were shambolic and it ended in tragedy, with a total of seven lives lost, including Burke and Wills.

Although a few can pull it off, most judges have the good sense not to attempt an autobiography. Judges’ personalities are not usually of such outstanding interest, and their lives generally do not so engage with the world, as to generate the stuff from which autobiographies worth publishing are made. The reserve which the judicial experience inculcates, and the general inability to expose judicial life in prose that does not condemn the reader to death by suffocation, are additional inhibitors. Even those tragics who think that the judiciary occupies a place of mystical significance use the autobiographies of their colleagues as a cure for insomnia.

Biographies of judges are almost as often mired in languor as their autobiographical cousins. But there are exceptions. Michael Pelly provides the proof. He has never been a judge, though he has a postgraduate degree in law. Rather, he is an experienced journalist. And he can write – very well. Nevertheless, he has taken on a hazardous task. He has attempted the biography of a man who was not only a judge but of whom a judicial colleague (Justice Roderick Meagher, of the New South Wales Court of Appeal) has said, not altogether in jest, that ‘he never utters an unnecessary word. He has written nothing outside his professional work. He takes no interest in either music or art. He does, however, like flowers. He stares at them to make them wilt.’

Two government acts shaped Tina Faulk’s life: Ceylon’s 1956 Official Language Policy Act, known as the Sinhala Only Act, and Australia’s Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, better known as the White Australia policy. The first virtually disenfranchised not only Faulk’s Burgher community, but also Sinhalese and Tamil middle-class élites, whose primary language, outside the family circle, was English. Countless Burghers were civil servants and, even if multilingual, were now unable to compete with Sinhalese-educated people for post-Independence public service positions. Similar selection criteria applied to military and commercial jobs.

In May 2009, Sri Lanka’s three-decade-long civil war came to an end with the government’s defeat of the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (known as the Tamil Tigers). The long conflict had brought a range of horrific abuses: deliberate shelling of civilian areas; suicide bombing of civilian targets; enforced disappearances; rape; forced conscription, including child soldiers; and the use of civilians as human buffers. In 2011 a UN panel of experts made preliminary findings that these abuses were violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law and that some could even amount to crimes against humanity. This prompted the current international investigation into the allegations by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.

When St Paul’s burned down in 1561, no one was in any doubt that it was the work of God. The debate – and it was a furious one in the press of the time – concerned what this said about His views on the abolition of the mass. Contemporary press reports of the Battle of Lepanto, the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and the Spanish Armada show how reporting of even the most important events was subject to wide variations in timeliness and accuracy. The church, with its networks of pilgrims and crusaders, played an important role in gathering and disseminating news in the late Middle Ages, but it was often merchants who were behind major advances, sometimes setting up their own networks. When the noise of conflicting reports became overwhelming, they tended to share information and to let everyone work out for themselves, or with friends, what they wanted to believe.

Over at the academy, the lecture is not what it used to be. Colourful slides and short videos accompany the spoken word, and this audio-visual feast can be ordered take-away, lecture recordings instantly downloadable from the university’s ‘learning management system’. Students sit, laptops open, alternating their gaze between the lectern and the web. Many stay home, speeding up the recordings to whiz through the dull bits. Academics speculate on whose lectures will be chipmunked the most.

Most of these students are digital natives, a generation that has grown up with the Internet, Facebook, immersive video games, and mobile devices. According to Susan Greenfield, a prolific Oxford neuroscientist, the natives are restless. They are also narcissistic, superficial, passive, inattentive, uncentred, and aggressive. In Mind Change, Greenfield ties these failings together as a syndrome of our time. Its cause, she argues, is the steady encroachment of digital technologies into our lives. Greenfield has raised concerns about their influence for many years, and her book attempts to marshal the scientific evidence to support them.

In 2013, publisher Sigrid Rausing significantly reduced Granta magazine’s staff, and long-time editor John Freeman resigned. At this news, various high-profile contributors, including Peter Carey, expressed their concern for the future of the magazine. But if we can judge solely on the quality of this edition, the new Rausing-edited Granta has lost none of its verve. It remains chock-full of fine writing and art.

With fate as its theme, much of the work in this edition speaks to love, loss, and mortality. Which is not to say that it makes for grim reading. The lead story, Louise Erdrich’s ‘Domain’, may be dark in subject matter, but it is also playful. A take on a no doubt popular science fiction theme, ‘Domain’ presents a future world in which the quality of your digitally uploaded afterlife is determined by which of the various corporate-owned simulations you can afford. It is literary in tone without sacrificing the pay-off of genre.

Given the deluge of cookery books and unrelenting television programs, it is hard to imagine a time when there wasn’t a single Australian cookery book. This year marks the sesquicentenary of the first: The English and Australian Cookery Book, a volume published anonymously in London, and compiled by ‘An Australian Aristologist’, Edward Abbott. Abbott (1801–69) was born in Sydney and by 1818 was working in Hobart. He became a newspaper proprietor, establishing the Hobart Town Advertiser in 1839, and a member of the Tasmanian House of Assembly (1864–65) and the Legislative Council (1864–86). It was during his political career that he prepared and published this volume.

Vipers and whistleblowers

Much has been written about the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs), now in their seventh year. Advances was at the National Gallery of Victoria on 8 December when the winners were named. An opulent affair, it was televised by Sky News and SBS à la the Man Booker Prize. The Great Hall – deemed rather small by one distinguished literary editor from Sydney – was full of publishers and journalists, but also assorted politicians, festival directors, and senior bureaucrats. Happily, there were many shortlisted authors amid the potentates.

Kevin Rudd, who created these awards in 2008, tended to stay away, which always felt odd – and discouraging. This year Tony Abbott and his entourage were there in force. The prime minister gave every impression that the government will maintain these awards.

These are lucrative prizes, liberating for winners. Each of them is worth a total of $100,000 tax free (would that more literary prizes were similarly exempt). This year, three of the six prizes were shared – Australian History, Non-Fiction, and Fiction. This seems sensible, given the value of these prizes.

‘None of the winners’ speeches was as riveting as Michelle de Kretser’s in Brisbane last year ... but, with one exception, the speeches were generous, witty, thoughtful – and succinct’

None of the winners’ speeches was as riveting as Michelle de Kretser’s in Brisbane last year – when she lambasted the Rudd government (in front of Tony Burke, the immigration and arts minister) for its treatment of asylum seekers – but, with one exception, the speeches were generous, witty, thoughtful – and succinct. Melinda Smith – winner of the poetry award with her fourth collection, arrestingly titled Drag Down to Unlock or Place an Emergency Call – chose to dedicate her prize to Australian carers. (What a coup it was for new publisher Pitt Street Poetry to have two nominees on the five-strong shortlist.) Bob Graham, winner in the Children’s Fiction category, pointedly donated some of his prize money to the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre. Then came Fiction. Advances was seated on the HarperCollins table and can attest to the comprehensive shock that Steven Carroll received when he was named co-winner with Richard Flanagan. Flanagan had a long, pally tête-à-tête with the prime minister, then announced that he intended to donate his prize money ($40,000) to the Indigenous Literacy Foundation, a popular gesture.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Hal G.P. Colebatch

Hal G.P. Colebatch – a surprise co-winner in the Australian History category – gave a rancorous and interminable speech about wartime traitors and unionists. One person seated on our table remarked, ‘Well, we don’t need to read the book – we’ve just heard it.’

In the days that followed, thanks largely to Stephen Romei (literary editor of The Australian), we learned much more about the judging process and the extent of the political intervention. Not for the first time, a prime minister had overturned a jury’s recommendation; but on this occasion judges were prepared to go on the record. Ann Moyal told Susan Wyndham (Sydney Morning Herald) that she was totally opposed to favouring Colebatch’s ‘poorly constructed and poorly written’ book. More ominously for the officials, an enraged Les Murray went even further. Murray (one of three poets determining the Fiction award) revealed that the judges had unanimously recommended Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People as the winner, only to learn on the night that Tony Abbott had chosen Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North as co-winner. Murray told Romei: ‘I was shocked that they went behind the scenes and worked a swifty.’ He also indulged in a few intemperate asides. Of ‘the Tasmanian fellow’s’ novel, he said: ‘It is a pretentious, stupid book.’ Then, Christmas upon us, he declared that ‘The literary scene is such a nest of vipers.’

The authorities tried to restore order by reminding the judges of the confidential nature of the judgements. One wag opined that the horse had probably bolted. Mixing our metaphors, Advances suspects that Les Murray is one whistleblower who is unlikely to be corralled.

Louise Adler – chairwoman of the judging panel – offered an extraordinary defence of the prime minister’s right to ignore the judges’ decision. ‘These are not Louise Adler’s literary awards or Les Murray’s literary awards – they are the Prime Minister’s literary awards,’ she told Stephen Romei. Have we really come to this? Taxpayers fund these awards: why should they be in a politician’s personal gift? Literary fiction is hardly Mr Abbott’s area of expertise. Did he read all five novels before honouring Flanagan’s book? And what of the judges? What of their expertise? Why would anyone now serve on the PMLA panel on such terms?

Steven Carroll, Tony Abbott, and Richard Flanagan

Brouhahas aside, the PMLAs are a lucrative and galvanising reality. It’s important for a wealthy and cultivated nation like Australia to have awards of this kind. Only the current dilatoriness and unpredictability of these prizes prevent them from gaining widespread stature and traction. They should transcend the Miles and the Stella in importance and coverage, but at present they don’t. Announcing the PMLAs a fortnight before Christmas robs them of the commercial clout that would be welcomed by writers and an industry that has done it tough in recent years and that would benefit from a timely, well-publicised ‘PMLA boost’ in October or early November. At present these awards reward and gratify a number of writers, but the effect should be more diffuse, with major benefits for booksellers, publishers, and readers.

Clive James in his element

For someone who is gravely ill, Clive James is in remarkably fine literary fettle – irrepressible indeed, as we can tell from his mordacious poem ‘A Silent Speech by Julia Gillard’ (an Editor’s choice, we should note, not the poetry editor’s). James’s writings on the great poets – Auden, Bishop, Larkin, Montale et al. – remain essential reading for any young poet. Now we have a new compilation: Poetry Notes 2006–2014 (Picador). Geordie Williamson, who reviews the book on page 26, notes that ‘a great critic can reawaken a dormant sense of wonder for what poetry can do’.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is the country’s principal short story prize, and we are delighted to be able to present it again in 2015 (with generous support from ABR Patron Ian Dickson). Total prize money will be $8,000 (the winner receives $5,000). As with all our prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). Authors can enter online. See our website for more details.

Short story writers will have until 1 May to enter. The judges are Amy Baillieu, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Paddy O’Reilly. The winner will be announced at a suspenseful ceremony during the Brisbane Writers Festival (3–6 September 2015).

Lovers of the shorter form might be interested in joining our first cultural tour: the ABR Brisbane Writers Festival Tour, your chance to be part of the Jolley Prize ceremony. Spend a few days meeting writers and attending special ABR events. More details will follow early next year, but meanwhile reserve your place: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Free ABR Online subscriptions

Support from ABR Patrons has transformed the magazine since 2010, and now enables us to offer 100 free one-year subscriptions to ABR Online to those aged twenty-one and under.

All you have to do is phone ABR on (03) 9699 8822 or email Business Manager, Grace Chang, at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will need date of birth verification, and terms and conditions apply. Readers and subscribers who know someone who might be interested in this special offer are encouraged to notify them. It is a great way to introduce young readers – especially students – to the magazine. Be quick, though: these complimentary subscriptions will be snapped up early in the New Year.

Radiant Young Leaders

Dear Editor,

Are Richard Broinowski (and family) seeking to don the mantle of apologists for the rulers of North Korea (review of Paul French’s North Korea: State of Paranoia in ABR, October 2014)? At the end of his enthusiastic review, Broinowski tosses off this fulsome compliment: ‘It belongs, in rare company, on the same shelf as the enlightened works of the American Bruce Cumings.’

Seeing people who remind you
just a little of the dead
is always mildly disconcerting –

something in the face, the gait,
the shoulders from behind,
those likenesses that don’t surprise