‘Welcome to the Netherlands!’ the sign says in Dutch and English. The Schipol customs official inspects my Australian passport. ‘Nederlands geboren,’ he sniffs. ‘Zo je komt terug.’ So you’ve come back, he adds, in a tone suggesting that I might have left something behind minutes ago, rather than decades. ‘Skippy!’ He stamps my passport viciously. I consider a withering retort, but there are soldiers patrolling in pairs nearby, machine guns slung across their chests. Hours before my plane landed, eleven illegal immigrants burned to death in the prison facility at Schipol. Edginess pervades the airport.

I have returned to the Netherlands to have a specific conversation with the past. I would prefer to have this conversation in Dutch. Unfortunately, that useful English concept ‘the past’ – with its emotionally laden baggage trailing into near and distant history – is linguistically impossible in Dutch. At one extreme, there is the phrase: ‘verleden tijd’, the strictest meaning of which is ‘dead times’; at the other, ‘vroeger’, a sort of flat Dutch close to the English ‘olden days’, an indefinite gesture to an unspecified era. The fluidity, the emotional creak with which one can summon ‘the past’ using English, is not possible in Dutch.

Better, then, to slip and slide between the languages, stumbling up and down the treacherous slope of bilingualism. Try to make some sort of landing.

I am sitting outside a café in the markt, the square of Middelburg, the provincial capital of Zeeland, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Northerners, such as the free-wheeling residents of Amsterdam, think of this area as the deep, intractable south and rarely visit, which suits the southerners just fine. This is where I come from. I am a Zeelander. Zeeuws. Middelburg-born and bred. This is the heartland of Calvinist Protestantism. Zeeland was one of the first provinces to join with the House of Orange to throw off the Spanish-Catholic yoke and has never allowed the royal house to forget it. The Zeeuws see themselves as forthright and determined. Others see us as stubborn, bloody-minded and unforgiving.

Zeeland is a recent geographic addition to the planet’s past, created over the last ten thousand years from the silt washed down from the great rivers of central Europe.

What the rivers of Europe deposit, the North Sea battles to subtract. This is a land of massive sea dykes, triumphant tales of reclamation, and tragic sacrifices to the sea. The provincial standard of Zeeland shows a lion half submerged in water, and carries the Latin declaration Luctor et Emergo, I arise from disaster. The unofficial motto of Zeeland is ‘Never Forget, Never Forgive’.

Elisabeth Holdsworth’s paternal grandparents (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

Middelburg lies at the centre of a former island, Walcheren, a long nose poking into the North Sea. When I was a child, Walcheren was still an island. Indeed, the land-neck joining Walcheren to the rest of Zeeland is so narrow, so tenuously held by a defiant army of dykes, that Walcheren may yet become an island again should sea levels rise. The watery arms of the east and west Schelde surround Walcheren. During World War II, the German North Sea fleet anchored in the Schelde off Vlissingen, south-western side of Walcheren. They used the shipyards at Vlissingen to repair their ships, with Dutch slave labour. Whenever the Allied bombers flew over the shipyards, men sang the national anthem and waved the standard of the House of Orange, symbol of the Resistance, even as Nazi machine gunners mowed them down.

My father and his three brothers avoided being taken to Vlissingen by joining the Resistance. Their life expectancy wasn’t any greater than it would have been had they worked for the Germans. Twenty-three thousand Resistance fighters died for the freedom of the Netherlands, my father’s two younger brothers among them.

‘Twenty-three thousand Resistance fighters died for the freedom of the Netherlands, my father’s two younger brothers among them.’

In November 1944, to liberate the Netherlands and begin the final push into Germany, the Allies, with the help of the Resistance, blew up the dykes protecting Walcheren from the sea. In some parts of Middelburg, the highest point on Walcheren, the water rose to two and a half metres above street level. The rich silt plains surrounding the city were obliterated. The Americans and the British trapped the Germans on Walcheren between their amphibious vehicles and the deep waters of the western Schelde. The surrendering Germans were herded onto the same trains that had transported a quarter of a million Dutch Jews to the concentration camps and ‘escorted’ them from the Netherlands.

Although I possess pieces of paper declaring me to be an Australian citizen, Zeeland is my heritage, the land of my nightmares, my past. No matter how much I try to infuse my brain with kangaroos and drought-riddled plains, I am enraptured by the land of my birth.

In the seventeenth century, Middelburg was the second city of the Dutch East India Company, after Amsterdam. Middelburg is small, the population less than forty thousand, yet the public and private buildings are grand, outsized – reminders of that wealthy time. My father’s family was part of the fabric of Middelburg and Zeeland since the thirteenth century. Their fortune rose as the Dutch East India Company prospered, and fell when that tune stopped playing. When Father was born in 1910, the family was still one of the wealthiest in Zeeland. My mother was also born in 1910, to a poor Jewish family in a sequestered community in an impoverished part of Zeeland called Zeeuws Vlaanderen – Flanders. Her parents and most members of their community were illiterate.

In 1910 both families shared the riches of children, the certain knowledge of continuity. I was the only child born to either family after the war. I am the last survivor of both families. I don’t have children, so it all ends with me. But not just yet.

I am sitting outside a café in the markt of Middelburg on a Sunday in November 2005. The day is so warm I have removed my coat, hat and gloves. In the Novembers of my childhood, I waded to school across the markt through snow, ice and winds so fierce they whistled through the holes once occupied by my baby teeth. This café is the same one my parents and I lunched at most Sundays after church. Mother and Father always chose this particular position, perhaps this very table, because the Stadhuis, the town hall – the gothic structure from which the rulers of Zeeland governed the province for six hundred years – is directly opposite.

When we dined here in the 1950s, the Stadhuis was a pile of war rubble covered with scaffolding. My father, a keen amateur photographer, had no trouble fitting what was left of the Stadhuis within the sight of his camera. No matter how I jiggle my camera, I can’t get the whole building and spire within the frame.

In Zeeland, food and alcohol may not be served on Sundays until the Protestant God says so. While waiting for the church bells to ring, I dip into the Volkskrant, the centrist newspaper founded by the Resistance during the war. The mild November weather has the Volkskrant in a spin. A large part of the glossy section is devoted to climate change. According to the Volkskrant, this is the warmest autumn since records began. Over the last thirty years, the Dutch growing season has been extended by almost three weeks, adding billions to the economy. For the moment, the Netherlands is benefiting from the warming of the planet.

Plumes of cigarette smoke gust out of the restaurant. Dutch attitudes to smoking are infuriating. I have had jousts with fellow hotel guests who light up as soon as they enter the breakfast room. I have nearly been run over by bike-riding maniacs whose hands can’t make contact with the handlebars because they have a mobile phone in one hand, bottled water in the other and a fag in their mouths.

The church bells are ringing: single, dour notes from the Dutch Reformed church; carillons from the Catholics. I may now order food and a drink. My parents adored the Zeeuws specialty (grilled mussels). I hated the greasy, gritty molluscs back then. Now that I have a mature and sophisticated palate, perhaps I will enjoy them.

A party of young Germans in hiking gear investigates the inside of the café. They emerge fanning their faces, overwhelmed by the cigarette smoke, and join the non-smokers outside. They study the menu, which is printed in Dutch. The waiter who attends them has mislaid his ability to speak German. He claims he can supply gebroken Engels (broken English) and that the chef is proficient in Japanese, but German … das is nicht … he throws his hands into the air.

Using English, the Germans order fish and chips. One of the party, a young, dark-haired girl, extracts a notebook from her pack and begins writing. She sniffs and swivels her head, no doubt in search of local colour. I return to the Volkskrant.

Paris is burning. Disaffected, marginalised youth are warning the French that they are no longer prepared to be an underclass. There have been riots in Rotterdam. The Dutch immigration minister has attended a memorial service at Schipol for the detainees who burned to death. Candles have been lit, but Dutch government policies will not be relaxed. The Netherlands has the most repressive immigration policy of any European country.

‘Paris is burning. Disaffected, marginalised youth are warning the French that they are no longer prepared to be an underclass’

The Volkskrant revisits a simmering question, whether or not a Dutch army unit serving in Bosnia stood by, either knowingly or ineptly, while atrocities were committed. In a placatory, diplomatic move, a Dutch bomb squad, famed for its defusing abilities, has offered to assist with the cleansing of minefields in Kosovo.

Dresden Cathedral, bombed in the last months of World War II, has finally been restored. No representative of the Dutch government or the royal family will attend the rededication ceremonies. The Volkskrant reports that the ceremony will not be broadcast on free-to-air television in the Netherlands.

The party of Germans at the next table is talking loudly and animatedly about soccer. The Australian Socceroos, coached by a Dutchman, have defeated Uruguay in a prelude to the 2006 World Cup. The Volkskrant reports that some Dutch soccer fans have announced their intention of travelling to Germany for the finals matches dressed in orange and wearing German helmets. The Volkskrant expresses half-hearted disapproval of the wearing of German helmets. Orange, the standard of the royal house of Orange-Nassau, is everywhere. As orange is inextricably connected with Dutch Protestantism, this seems rather too bad for Catholics, Muslims and the few Jews who survived the war. To my father, orange was the symbol of the Resistance. The flag flown from the roof of our house was the tricolour of the united provinces. I wish he was sitting here opposite me in this café in the markt, in Middelburg, so that I could ask him what he thinks about all this orange business. We might share a laugh about the Dutch army and the cleansing of minefields.

Elisabeth Holdsworth (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

After the war, the Germans left the open country around Middelburg littered with mines. The inner city, the binnenstad, had been flattened. My parents’ house – like those of most of my friends – was only partly habitable. The back of our house was a memory, our once famous eighteenth-century garden a bomb crater. Whenever the weather was fine, my friends and I roamed unconstrained in fields outside Middelburg that had been cleansed. We didn’t yearn for a backyard: the whole of our shattered city and the open expanses of Walcheren were at our disposal.

‘After the war, the Germans left the open country around Middelburg littered with mines’

Our parents were involved with the reconstruction of Zeeland. (Dutch has about a million words to convey reconstruction after wars, flood damage, civil wars, religious wars etc.) We, the children born just after the war, were a blessing and a burden: a blessing in that we were born at all; a burden because our parents were so preoccupied with the rebuilding and with regaining their psychic strength in the aftermath of the war they did not know how to cope with us. My friends and I – four boys, two girls – formed a special unit. We had all been struck down by the rheumatic fever epidemic of late 1949. The medical profession regarded our hearts with suspicion. We were prevented from attending kindergarten, then we were judged too frail to start first grade.

My mother didn’t work in the sense that she earned a wage. Father’s family was too grand to have one of its women working in other than a voluntary capacity. Thus Mother volunteered to look after us. Although we loved roaming when school was in, pitying the poor saps locked up in classrooms, we were hungry to learn. In the afternoons, when we were supposed to be resting our weakened hearts, Mother taught us to read and write. She called us the Nachgeborenen – those who come after – in honour of Bertolt Brecht. She knew his poem ‘An Die Nachgeborenen’ (written in 1939 as Germany was invading Poland) by heart, in both German and Dutch. When she was distracted by the inner turmoils that bedevilled her and muttered ‘Wirklich ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten!’ (Truly, I live in dark times), we knew we were in for a few rough hours.

We were confused by Mother’s use of German – she was supposed to be a Jew – but at the age of six we didn’t agonise too much. My closest friend, Fritz, the lord mayor’s son, told us not to listen to what Mother was saying, but rather to live in her voice which, to the end of her life, carried the telltale signature of her first language, a dialect infused with Yiddish and Flemish. Most of the time, this tactic worked. However, if Mother caught us daydreaming, she threw whatever book was at hand at our unwary heads. Fritz earned a bloody nose this way, one of the other boys a bruised ear. Mother was beautiful at a time when physical beauty only existed in the world created by Hollywood. Everyone else around us was too physically affected by the ravages of the war to be considered anything other than passable. Mother’s auburn hair and flawless complexion fascinated my friends. She was rumoured to be one of the thirteen hundred Dutch survivors of Dachau. My friends urged me to ask for details. Too afraid of Mother’s mood swings, I never did.

‘Mother was beautiful at a time when physical beauty only existed in the world created by Hollywood’

We were beset by boundless curiosity to see what lay at the edge of our world. We longed to find war booty, a German helmet, anything marked with a swastika. On fine mornings, we left Middelburg and the wreckage of the binnenstad, with packets of sandwiches, books and, if we were lucky, a piece of fruit. Oranges were the price of gold after the war.

The flooding of Walcheren in the liberation of 1944 had killed the ancient spreading elms and beeches that had graced our island for centuries. The only trees we knew were poplars marching over flat land to an infinite horizon.

One day, we ran toward a row of dunes. I can’t remember why. We had few reasons for anything we did. Before we reached the dunes, we were surrounded by lightning which struck the ground in a crazy dance. We ran on between raindrops the size of eggs, arms and legs flailing, knowing we had to avoid the poplars; their upright stance acted like a magnet for the violent electrical storms that ravaged our island in summer.

We came to a barbed wire fence and crawled underneath into a field pocked with holes and wires poking out of them. ‘Alien antennae!’ Fritz and I yelled at the others. We were addicted to a serial on the radio in which aliens figured prominently. Above the noise of the thunder and lightning, we didn’t hear the voices booming from loud hailers telling us to move away. Finally, through a gap in the storm, we heard them and walked reluctantly to the source of the angry voices. I gave one antenna a last delicious jiggle. Faces stared at us. Mouths opened in horror and moved in silence. Arms beckoned us urgently. Yet we strolled nonchalantly towards the army men. One of the men mimed tiptoeing. That looked like fun. We didn’t mind doing that. Near the fence, hands grabbed at us, dragging us roughly through the barbed wire. Then a mighty bang, leaving all of us, children and army men, covered from head to foot in dirt.

The soldiers escorted us to our respective homes. At the lord mayor’s residence, Fritz was dragged inside by the ear. I knew what would happen at my house. Mother erupted into a dreadful rage. She began to beat me, eyes wide, tongue protruding from between her teeth. Her blows rained about my head. When my father intervened, she tried to hit him. Father was over six foot tall, she no more than five one, so her fists thumped away uselessly. The soldiers snuck away. Mother’s rage subsided, followed by tears and a retreat to her bedroom.

Father tried to clean me up in the bathroom only recently reconnected to running water. ‘Don’t know what all the fuss was about. Those mines were half defused,’ he chuckled. ‘You might have lost an arm or leg at most.’ Father used black humour to cope with the effects of his war. He drank too much gin, smoked too many cigars, but he was the glue that held our family together. When he put me to bed later, he added: ‘Took us twelve years to have you. Too old to have any more. Appreciate it if you don’t die just yet. Tomorrow, I’ll go up to the school. You and your gang had better go to school before you blow up the rest of Walcheren.’

That night, the first of the Nachgeborenen died when his heart, damaged by rheumatic fever, stopped beating while he slept. The rest of us were not told until after the funeral.

At the end of summer, we were allowed into the first grade. After two weeks, Fritz and I were moved into the second, and placed at a desk at the back. Mother’s haphazard education had made us too advanced in some areas, woefully behind in others.

The Nachgeborenen, Elisabeth Holdsworth second from left, Fritz front centre
(photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

One of the young Germans at the next table is reading from a guidebook to Middelburg. ‘The Stadhuis was badly burnt in 1940 and had to be renovated. The renovations weren’t completed until 1976. Wonder what caused the fire?’ Although he is speaking in German, the other Dutch sitting around me understand. There is a collective raising of eyebrows, a thinning of lips.

The Netherlands had capitulated to the Germans. The royal family fled, firstly to England, where Queen Wilhelmina remained for the rest of the war, broadcasting almost daily on Radio Oranje. Princess Juliana, the heir to the throne, and her children sought refuge in Canada. The Gestapo had taken up residence in the Dam Palace in Amsterdam. The port city of Rotterdam, so vital to an eventual Allied advance, hoisted the white flags of surrender in order to save the city. The Germans realised they could never use Rotterdam as a port; the coast was too open and too close to England. On 17 May 1940, in the earliest example of blitzkrieg, the Germans bombed Rotterdam to the ground, into the sea and out of history. When the Luftwaffe was finished with Rotterdam, they turned south-west. From the attic of our house, in the centre of Middelburg, my parents watched the sky fill with the bomber squadrons. The Luftwaffe dropped so many bombs on the binnenstad of Middelburg, particularly on the Stadhuis, one of the finest Gothic buildings in Europe, that a fireball developed. The Stadhuis, the Abdij Kerk, a complex of abbeys dating back to the twelfth century, the markt and the surrounding streets were consumed by flames. Vlissingen – the port and shipyards – was bombed, but only enough to force the populace into submission.

’On 17 May 1940, in the earliest example of blitzkrieg, the Germans bombed Rotterdam to the ground, into the sea and out of history‘

In the four years until liberation, the island of Walcheren became a prime bombing target for the Allies. I have my family’s photographic collection, some dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. One poignant shot shows the Stadhuis and markt in 1939. On the back Father has written: ‘Zo was het voor de oorlog nu is alles verwoest.’ This is how it was before the war. Now everything is destroyed. Verwoest, however, means something more than mere destruction: the sense that a page in a dark night of history has been turned in a book that can never be reopened.

The author’s parents’ wedding, 1935 (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

The mussels are gritty and make me feel ill, the same reaction I had as a child. I get up to leave. The young German girl has stopped writing. In English she asks me to take a photograph of her party. ‘I presume you are a tourist, like us,’ she says, pointing to my camera.

‘I’m Dutch,’ I say. ‘Born in this city just after the war. I live in Australia.’

She bites her lip. My German is good enough for me to suggest ways the youngsters might sit. Aim. Fire. The image on the digital camera shows them captured in all their youthful innocence. I ask the German youngsters where they are staying.

‘At the Rue de Commerce, opposite the station,’ they answer.

‘I’m sure you’ll be comfortable there. I’m at the same hotel.’ The Rue de Commerce was the headquarters of the Zeeuws Resistance during the war. They hid in the cellars and used the waterway immediately in front of the hotel to enter and exit Middelburg. It is a source of pride to the Zeeuws that everyone in Zeeland knew where the Resistance was housed, but the location was never betrayed to the Germans.

‘The hotel was built by a French consortium in 1886,’ I say to the Germans as I walk away, ‘and has an amusing history.’

A few streets beyond the Stadhuis is our family home: number 1, Singel Straat, a plain, unadorned house reflecting the Calvinist Protestantism of my father’s family. The blown-off rear of the house has been seamlessly restored. A plaque by the front door registers this as a site of historical interest, but does not mention that this is a resewn version of the original. I had forgotten how narrow the street was, yet how large the house: three storeys high and extending to the street behind. My grandparents lived opposite in number 2. Across the top of their house, a date is picked out in gold leaf: Anno 1743.

My parents, when discussing the bombing of Middelburg in May 1940, always ended the tale with the sky turning black with the planes of the Luftwaffe. They skated over the next part: hiding in the coal cellars until the German bombers went away. They dwelt lovingly and with much merriment on the detail that Middleburg had been so thoroughly bombed that the German high command hadn’t left themselves a building grand enough from which to govern the ungovernable province of Zeeland. The Germans ended up using the top two floors of the Hotel Rue de Commerce.

From the Singel Straat, the dome of the Oostkerk (the Dutch Reformed Church) – finished in 1667 and embellished with all the money available from the golden age – dominates the surrounding streets. The dome has a belfry to admit natural light rather than the candles associated with Catholicism. The Oostkerk was the first church in the Netherlands to be built by Protestants for Protestants. Most Protestant churches are stripped former Catholic houses. Inside, a tier rises facing the Predikant’s lectern. Father’s family name is inscribed on the most prominent row of pews. My ancestors sat there for three hundred years, looking down on the rest of the congregation, convinced of their piety and superior social status.

On the spot where Grandfather sat, as head of the family, there is a gold plaque below the armrest commemorating the deaths of his sons: the two who died during the war, and the eldest, Lijnus Hendrikus, murdered in 1945. Of Grandfather’s five children, my father was the only one to marry and produce an heir, a puny Nachgeborenen who contracted rheumatic fever in 1949 and might have died at any time.

Grandfather hated long sermons. Whenever the Predikant raved on too long, Grandfather banged his walking stick on the railing in front of him until the sermon ceased. Fritz and the lord mayor’s family occupied the pews on the other side of the church. Every Sunday I had to avoid catching Fritz’s eye in case I broke into uncontrollable giggles.

Grandmother was a saint. I knew this to be so, because she always wore long black dresses and a white coif to denote her piety. Around her neck, heavy gold necklaces were interspersed with creepy black beads. Grandmother, stiff-lipped, ramrod-straight, waited every Sunday for Grandfather to bring down his walking stick. As soon as he did she paused, widened her eyes, then bowed to the Predikant.

Mother rarely attended church. She was excused on account of her fluctuating moods and her Jewishness. The only time Mother attended church was when Father’s unmarried sister visited Middelburg. Tante Katrien was hofdame, lady-in-waiting to the former Queen Wilhelmina. Katrien had accompanied Wilhelmina into exile in England; after the abdication in 1949, she attended the queen in the crumbling palace, Het Loo.

‘In an era of shortages, combined with the Calvinist austerity that governed our lives, my mother dressed like a peacock’

In an era of shortages, combined with the Calvinist austerity that governed our lives, my mother dressed like a peacock. She made all her own clothes on a treadle Singer sewing machine, copying patterns out of magazines. We were supposed to be wealthy, but by the early 1950s that wealth, mostly gleaned from the Dutch East Indies, had evaporated. On the quiet, and to supplement her income, Mother made clothes for the ‘ladies’ of Middleburg. When Tante Katrien visited and attended church in her dreary black court costume that swished the ground, Mother made sure she wore a short dress to show off her shapely legs, and, if possible, a new, brightly coloured outfit to outrage the congregation.

Tante Katrien possessed a magnificent string of black pearls brought back from the East by one of my privateer ancestors. Katrien was not allowed to wear the pearls at court, as the House of Orange-Nassau did not possess black pearls. She made sure she wore them every minute of every day she was in Middelburg. I longed to stroke the pearls to test whether they felt as silky as they looked.

Tante Katrien disapproved of me. I was precocious, indulged, the product of an unsuitable marriage. She never addressed me directly, but referred to me as het kind, the child. Tante Katrien regarded me with distant, ice-blue eyes. I avoided them in case they made my heart stop.

Father’s family was baptised in the Oostkerk. I was baptised there, too. My first given name is a family name. My other two names, Miriam and Esther, came from women whom Mother befriended at Dachau and who died there. Mother often boasted that she fought Grandmother and Tante Katrien to stand in that Calvinist place to give me a Jewish legacy, implanted with all the burdens of a different past.

Elisabeth Holdsworth with Opa and Oma in Greode (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

I meet the Germans again in the bar of the Rue de Commerce. They summon me to their table for a drink. ‘We walked the Bolwerk,’ the dark-haired girl tells me. The Bolwerk is a linear park alongside a system of canals following the line of the medieval walls that once protected the city of Middelburg.

‘We loved the windmills,’ she says shyly.

Halfway round the Bolwerk there are two windmills, relics of a time when thousands of mills creaked and groaned throughout the Netherlands. Wind turbines and nuclear power provide Dutch energy now. Next to the mills is a Jewish cemetery for Orthodox Ashkenazi Jews. Before the war there were two synagogues in Middelburg, two Jewish schools. The Sephardim and Ashkenazi both had thriving communities within the province of Zeeland. These days the Jews of Middelburg meet in the front room of a private house. There are twelve chairs for the congregation.

‘We went to the Stadhuis as well, for the guided tour,’ the German girl continues. ‘The guide didn’t leave us with any illusions. My friends couldn’t stand it. They left after five minutes. I stayed for the whole tour.’

‘Good for you,’ I say. I can think of nothing else.

‘I’m Eva,’ she says.

The bar manager turns on the television to a German news channel. The broadcast shows excerpts of the re-dedication of Dresden Cathedral and a recap of how Dresden was carpet-bombed by the Allies and consumed by a fireball.

‘They’re replaying that match between the Skippies and the Uruguayans on the Dutch station,’ one of the German boys says. ‘Can we watch that?’

‘Ja! Come on the Skippies!’ a Dutch voice yells. The bar manager obliges and switches channels.

I wish the German youngsters a good evening and retreat to my room.

Elisabeth Holdsworth with her father (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

Although November has been unusually warm, the days start late and close early. It is nearly the shortest day. I breakfast at seven a.m., to a backdrop of darkness. The Germans enter and settle at a table near me.

‘Guten morgen, Mevrouw Skippy,’ they greet me.

‘Guten Tag,’ I mumble from behind the Volkskrant.

The young girl, Eva, crushes into the seat next to me. ‘We’re going to Flanders today.’

‘Zeeuws Vlaanderen? Or the Belgian part?’

‘We’re taking the ferry across to Breskens.’

Zeeuws Vlaanderen then. That had been my plan. If I don’t commit to this trip, I fear the weather will deteriorate. If I hurry I can catch the first ferry, avoiding Eva and her friends.

The train from Middelburg to Vlissingen is a mere two carriages long. Just as it is about to leave, the Germans clamber on board with backpacks. ‘Ah, there is Mevrouw Skippy,’ they joke familiarly. A quarrel breaks out between Eva and a young man who I presume is her boyfriend. I crack open the Volkskrant, determined to have nothing to do with them.

The train journey to Vlissingen is only fifteen minutes. The train connects directly with the ferry. Until recently, the ferry was the only way across the Schelde to Zeeuws Vlaanderen on the other side. Now there is a tunnel sixty-four metres under the Schelde, for cars and buses. The ferry takes foot passengers and bikes.

The Schelde, a shocking blue, is as still as a pond. I have seen advertisements promoting Zeeland as the Riviera of Northern Europe. Climate change might yet make this true. From the aft deck, the high-rise developments of Vlissingen are visible. Looking the other way, I can see plumes of smoke above Antwerp; from the forward deck, I cansee ugly blocks offlats fronting the water at Breskens.

Eva sits next to me. She has been crying. She looks sideways at me to make sure I have noticed. I want to wallow in the past. I don’t want to be involved in her story. I don’t want her to intrude into mine.

‘Have you had a fight with your boyfriend?’

She sneaks a hand into mine.

‘My husband couldn’t get enough time off work to accompany me on this trip,’ I tell her. ‘We’ll both be returning to the Netherlands in the Spring.’ The hand is retracted, replaced by an awkward silence. ‘Durng the war the German North Sea Fleet anchored off Vlissingen. See, Eva, where the land curves like a boomerang. They were impregnable there. Tactically very clever.’ She looks at me, confused. ‘Come to the railing. Where the water boils on the horizon, that’s where the Schelde and the North Sea meet. Any ship riding over the top is visible for miles.’ As I speak, a container ship rises leviathan-like to perch for a moment on the frothing water before descending into the Schelde.

‘What about submarines?’ Eva asks.

‘There were submarine incursions, mostly spying missions. The water is shallow where the two bodies of water meet. Even submarines had to rise almost to the surface, making them visible to the watchers on shore. In the end, the only way to defeat the Germans was to flood Walcheren. The Nazis didn’t appreciate Dutch history. The Spaniards, French and English were all trapped in the same way.’

We are almost at the midpoint of the Schelde. I can see Domburg and the glint of water surrounding Veere. Father knew the estuarine waters around Veere almost as well as the fishermen. In a wide-bottomed mahogany sloop, he slipped through the estuary, ferrying Allied spies in and out of the Netherlands. Although his boat wasn’t suitable for the deep rough water of the North Sea, on several occasions he had to continue to the other side, right up the Thames and into London. On these forays, he flew both the tricolour and the standard of the House of Orange as soon as he was in English waters.

‘The Nazis had a price on Father’s head that was second only to the bounty they were prepared to pay for the capture of German-born Prince Bernhard, Queen Wilhelmina’s son-in-law and Commander in Chief of the pitiful Free Dutch forces’

He could have stayed in England and joined his sister Katrien at Queen Wilhelmina’s court, but each time he returned to Walcheren. The Nazis had a price on Father’s head that was second only to the bounty they were prepared to pay for the capture of German-born Prince Bernhard, Queen Wilhelmina’s son-in-law and Commander in Chief of the pitiful Free Dutch forces. Throughout the war, Bernhard snuck in and out of the Netherlands to meet with the Resistance via the shallow waters around Veere. Neither Father nor the prince was ever captured. Neither ever received so much as a scratch. In his biography, Prince Bernhard jokes that the only time he was ever wounded was one of the occasions he visited Middelburg just before the final invasion. He and Father were drinking gin in the basement of the Hotel Rue de Commerce while the German High Command of Zeeland dined upstairs. The prince relates that he drank so much and laughed so much he fell off his chair and broke a rib.

‘That’s Domburg over there, below the dunes,’ I say to Eva. ‘When I was a child, the beach was covered with war debris. A Norwegian commando unit came to grief there. Those blocks of concrete are all that remains of German watchtowers. The Norwegians landed at night but the Germans saw them, turned their spotlights on them, and that was the end. Domburg was another impregnable position. Once I tried to add up all the Allied lives lost trying to liberate the Netherlands. I stopped when I came to a quarter of a million.’

‘What about the Germans who lost their lives?’ Eva asks, accusingly.

‘I don’t care.’

‘But … but ... we have forgiven ourselves,’ Eva is almost shouting.

‘Queen Wilhelmina never forgave you. Until her death she marched every year with the Veterans at Wageningen. That’s where Bernhard accepted the German surrender. Prince Bernhard continued the tradition of marching with the veterans until he too died.’ As I walk away from Eva, I sense her diving for her notebook.

Except for the jazzed-up ferry terminal and the high-rise towers, Breskens looks much the same: a gateway to a forgotten land. The narrow strip known as Zeeuws Vlaanderen clings to a shred of Dutch identity. Before World War I, this area, no more than fourteen kilometres wide, was Belgian. Mother was born in a village close to Breskens, called Groede. Her earliest memories were of the guns of the Great War. She saw the soldiers creeping through her village, trying to get to the Schelde. If they made it to the other side, they were in the neutral Netherlands and free.

‘Can I come please?’ Eva has followed me off the ferry to the bus stop.

‘I’m going to a place called Groede. There’s nothing for you there.’ Her eyes beg me. ‘Oh, come on then.’ Despite her backpack, she leaps across the tarmac like a gazelle.

The distance to Groede is only 3.2 kilometres. I could have walked. We are off the bus before we have properly settled. Surely the journey took longer in the past.

According to Mother, Groede personified the middle of nowhere – forty minutes from Bruges, half an hour by ferry, bus and train from Middelburg. Other villages close by are all equally insignificant.

In 1918 Queen Wilhelmina brokered a deal with President Woodrow Wilson to have this strip of land incorporated into the Netherlands. As soon as the Dutch obtained Zeeuws Vlaanderen, they forgot it existed. When Wilhelmina entered the Netherlands after the liberation, she did so via Zeeuws Vlaanderen, the first time she had visited since 1918. British amphibious vehicles then transported the queen across to the Schelde to the flooded lands of Walcheren. Wilhelmina was famous for never revealing her emotions, but when she saw the sacrifices the people of Walcheren had made, deliberately flooding their land, she fell to her knees in the mud and salt water and cried ‘Mijn volk! Mijn volk!’ My people. My people.

In a country of churches, where every village has at least two large edifices striving to point a finger at God, Groede has one sublimely ugly square box with a spire added as an afterthought, and a plaque near the miserable front door proclaiming that the village was settled by Lutherans in the 1740s. I spent some of the happiest hours of my childhood here. I always addressed my grandparents in Middelburg formally as grootvader and grootmoeder. My grandparents in Groede were Oma and Opa. As the only child of both families to be born after the war, I was accorded a special place. I basked and gloried in their unconditional love. Whenever I read aloud from a newspaper, Oma and Opa’s eyes lit up and the neighbours were summoned to witness the miracle of a child reading.

The village radiating from the ugly church has barely changed. Yuppies have discovered a few of the houses. Of the few shops – a bakery, a minuscule supermarket, a local museum – nothing is open, nor will be until spring, five months away.

Eva is circling me cautiously. Although the village looks and feels familiar, after walking around for nearly an hour I still can’t locate Oma and Opa’s house. Their dwelling was less than modest: old, but not historically significant. There is no reason for their house to be still standing, other than my wanting it to be so.

Down a narrow street, we discover a restaurant that is being renovated. The doors are open. ‘Can we get something to eat?’ I ask peering inside, past the carpenter’s mess. The proprietor says she can do an omelette. After lighting a cigarette, she disappears into the kitchen. She reappears with plates of buttered bread decked with a slice of cheese and a barely fried egg wobbling on top. She bangs the plates down in front of us. ‘It’s going to snow soon.’ The egg yolk dashes unattractively down the mound of buttered bread. As soon as her back is turned, I push the plate away.

‘Is het niet lekker?’ Isn’t it tasty? the proprietor asks on her return. I am tempted to tell her exactly what I think of her beastly food, but Eva sends me a warning look.

‘You’re intruding into my story.’

She laughs. ‘You can always edit me out. Like this Groede. This place feels edited.’

‘There is no sign now of the Jewish community who lived here. Nothing,’ I say to her.

‘Were they taken away?’

‘The Germans didn’t realise there were Jews here. This area was so poor, so insignificant, supposedly Lutheran, they didn’t bother to check.’

The doors from the kitchen swing open. ‘You should not be speaking about these Jewish things!’ The proprietor screams at me, in Dutch. The cigarette in the corner of her mouth does not move. Eva is writing in her notebook.

‘We were speaking in English,’ I protest.

‘There are no Jews around here now.’

‘Did you know a family by the name of Van Roo. My grandmother and an uncle lived here until the 1980s.’

‘Look in the cemetery.’ Madam hands me an exorbitant bill. Eva offers to pay, but I slam the money on the counter first.

Oma and Opa had a small holding on the outskirts of Groede, a plot of land ending in a triangle fronting the main road. Opa grew all sorts of vegetables and cane fruits which he sold at markets. There was a horse for pulling his cart, and always a pig being fattened. Oma and Opa never ate any part of the pig.

‘Opa’s proudest possession was a gold watch he wore strung across his shirt on a chain, but he had never learnt to tell the time other than by the movements of the sun’

The old people didn’t speak Dutch. They spoke the local Vlaams dialect, interspersed with Yiddish. They lived without electricity and without clocks. Opa’s proudest possession was a gold watch he wore strung across his shirt on a chain, but he had never learnt to tell the time other than by the movements of the sun. Whenever we visited, he gave me the watch to wind and set to the right time. When I finished, I would announce the time and he would say, ‘Ist niet Wunderlich. Wunderlich.’ Even at a very young age, I knew this wasn’t Dutch or German or Yiddish.

Mother was the eldest of five children. On a day in 1920, when Mother was ten, my grandmother from Middelburg was being driven through Zeeuws Vlaanderen in her black carriage and four horses. She was looking for servants. Her eldest son, Lijnus Hendrikus, was driving the carriage. Father and Tante Katrien were inside with their mother. Grandmother’s cold blue eyes and remorseless Calvinist heart lighted on Mother’s auburn hair and creamy skin as the child played outside her parents’ house. Grandmother persuaded herself that Mother was thirteen at least. She gave Oma and Opa some money and a promise that Mother would be brought up Protestant. Mother remembered Oma and Opa standing by, terrified at the sounds coming from the mouth of the great lady from Middelburg. None of them understood her. They could not tell her they weren’t Protestants. They didn’t really understand what was going on until their daughter was driven away, seated between Father and Katrien. Then Oma began screaming. Opa mounted his ancient horse, but the carriage flew too fast.

All the way to Middelburg, Mother begged to be allowed to go home. Katrien pinched her on the arm every time she cried. Father stroked her other arm. Mother said she arrived in Middelburg black and blue on one side, and pink on the other.

After two weeks, she was allowed to go home to visit her parents. Mother walked the seven kilometres to Vlissingen, caught the ferry, then walked the three kilometres to Groede. Oma fed her as best she could, plied her with a parcel of food to supplement the meagre allowance doled out by Father’s family, and sent her off on the return journey. It didn’t occur to Oma and Opa not to send Mother back. They thought that they were being punished for something.

When Mother came to live in Middelburg, she had had a little schooling, in between helping look after her younger siblings. Father’s family had a huge library, and with his help she educated herself. Strangely, Father’s family didn’t prevent her from reading whatever she liked. She read voraciously for the rest of her life, terrified that this talent might somehow desert her if she didn’t keep it honed.

My parents never spoke of the circumstances under which they eventually married. The only wedding photograph, taken in front of the Oostkerk, shows Mother in a black wedding dress. The rest of the party, both sets of parents, Tante Katrien and father’s three brothers, are also in black. All are staring directly into the camera, excepting Uncle Lijnus. His head is turned to Mother. His mouth slightly open as though he would like to eat her.

The Markt and Stadhuis, Middelburg, 1939 (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

The cemetery is on the other side of the road, the same road that bisected Groede in the past. I am surprised to see it identified by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. We search for these graves first – two British sailors washed up on the nearby beach in that dreadful year of failed Allied offensives, 1944.

‘My parents never spoke of the circumstances under which they eventually married’

Eva tugs at my elbow and points to the lowering sky. ‘Tell me what we’re looking for.’

‘Van Roo or any combination of that name with others.’ Within minutes, we find the evidence: Mother’s brother, Piet Van Roo, who died without heirs in 1987 – the last of that family. Next to him are more Van Roos, then Risseeuw, Abrahams and, fascinatingly, Salomes. The earliest grave dates from 1780: one Miriam Risseeuw Salome. For the next two centuries, Abrahams married Risseuws and Salomes, until by the end of the 1870s the name becomes Risseeuw-Van Roo. Mother’s youngest brother, who died in 1918, is identified as Jaapie Risseeuw-Van Roo. The deaths after that become simply Van Roo. There are no Salomes or Abrahams after the 1970s.

Mother’s Jewish forebears arrived with or at the same time as the Lutheran settlers of the 1740s. By the time of my grandparents’ birth, all that remained of their Judaism was a mezuzah on the door and an aversion to eating pig meat. Whether a rabbi ever attended the community, I don’t know. There is no evidence of a synagogue. The Lutherans who also lived in Groede do not seem to have intermarried with their Jewish neighbours. They do not seem to have survived them, either.

Mother was the only one from her family to end up in a concentration camp. One of the ongoing arguments between my parents consisted of Mother screaming: ‘While you were playing at being a hero, I was in hiding!’ Early on in the war, Mother hid with her family in Groede. She left them, fearful that her presence would endanger the whole community. She hid in various farms belonging to Father’s family until she was betrayed in 1942. Father’s brother, Lijnus Hendrikus, gave Mother to the Nazis. He led them to her, telling them she was the wife of the famous Resistance leader. He stopped short of telling them she was a Jew. Mother spent the rest of the war in Dachau among political prisoners, terrified that the Germans would find out she was a Jew.

There was great lawlessness in the Netherlands after the liberation: summary executions, people mischievously denouncing their neighbours as Nazi sympathisers. Father had an Alsatian dog, a beautiful animal. The poor creature disappeared one day. He was found hung; first he had been disembowelled.

‘There was great lawlessness in the Netherlands after the liberation: summary executions, people mischievously denouncing their neighbours as Nazi sympathisers’

Uncle Lijnus was murdered in the early days of the liberation by a bullet to the back of the head. The Americans who were in charge of Middelburg came to see Father and asked to see his gun. Father said he had lost his gun on one of his last missions before the end of the war. Father had been decorated by Queen Wilhelmina and acclaimed by Prince Bernhard as a war hero. The matter of Uncle Lijnus’s death was not mentioned again. The only evidence that he lived at all was that gold plaque on the pew in the Oostkerk in Middelburg, which Grandfather fondled every Sunday.

I was very young when I absorbed the fact that my father had executed his brother. I didn’t learn it directly, rather from the silences that spoke volumes.

Middleburg after the bombing, May 1940 (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

‘It’s going to snow. I think I’ll go on to Bruges,’ Eva says. I hadn’t wanted her company, but now that she’s leaving I think I’ll miss her. The bus stop is opposite the cemetery. Behind is a newly renovated house, next to that a municipal garden ending in a triangle. ‘That’s Oma and Opa’s house!’ I shout.

The bus from Breskens arrives. As Eva is about to board, I ask her: ‘Have you read Brecht’s An Die Nachgeborenen?’ She rolls her eyes.

‘Truly, I live in dark times etc etc.’

‘The last stanza reads: “You, who will emerge from the flood / In which we drowned / Think / Of us …” Brecht ends: Mit Nachsicht. He means looking back with all the weight of history. The past isn’t a different country for Brecht. There’s no way to say “the past” in German or Dutch.’ I yell after the departing bus. Eva, smiling and waving, disappears from my story, no doubt to write her own. Perhaps I’ll recognise her from a photograph on the back of a book one day.

I wander around the outside of Oma and Opa’s house. Of their land, the lovely trees, the cane fruit that hung fat with blossoms every spring, nothing remains. The local council has transformed Opa’s plot into neat concrete rows. Stupid tulips will appear in due course.

I have missed the last bus to Breskens. Never mind, I tell myself, the walk is only a couple of kilometres. In the gloom of a failing afternoon, the landscape is desolate.

The high point, the glory years of Father’s life, were the war years. He said, not long before he died, that everything that came after felt flat.

But he had one more chance to be a hero. After the war, the dykes that the Allies and the Resistance had blown up for the final push into the Netherlands were patched and roughly rebuilt, destined to be rebuilt at a later date. The Netherlands looked to the reclamation of the Zuider Zee in the North as the major postwar project. Father was one of the chief engineers in charge of the maintenance of the dykes around Zeeland. Part of his job was to beg the government in The Hague for money. Very little was made available. Patching on patching was how he described it.

On 31 January 1953 a great storm surge in the Atlantic combined with the highest tides in living memory. Relentless winds hit the coast of England, flooding the Fen country and killing three hundred people. We heard the news on the radio. ‘This is the BBC World Service ...’ I can still mimic those crisp, sharp words. The Dutch translation followed the English version. Father’s face paled as he stood crouched over the radio to extract every comma, every full stop.

‘It’s all right, Papa,’ I hear my child’s voice say. ‘That’s England.’

Father turned around slowly. ‘Child, the water has to come back.’ He fetched his parents from across the road and ordered all of us to the attics at the top of our house. Then he disappeared on his motorbike to the dykes.

Mother and Grandmother spent the rest of the day ferrying valuables to the top of the house. Daylight poured through the roof, where it had not yet been properly repaired after the war. We sat on piles of Persian carpets surrounded by oil paintings – one of them a Rembrandt – while daylight poured through the roof. For once, Mother and Grandmother were speaking to each other. They were unconcerned about any danger to us. Middelburg was the highest point in Walcheren, and we lived in the epicentre of the city. Grandfather fixed up a coke heater and got the crystal radio working. He had used it during the war to listen to Queen Wilhelmina’s broadcasts from England.

By eight o’clock that night the storm out at sea abated to be replaced by a star filled night.

‘This is ridiculous,’ Mother said. ‘I’m going downstairs to sleep in my own bed.’

I begged her to stay in the attic. ‘Papa told us to stay here, remember.’

‘Always playing the hero,’ she grumbled. But she fell asleep on a pile of cushions and carpets. Grandmother, dressed in her long black dress and white coif, lay down next to her. Grandfather and I stayed awake listening to the radio. When the electricity died at nine p.m, we switched to the crystal radio. Through the window in the attic we could not see a single light anywhere in or around Middelburg.

‘This is Radio Hilversum. All residents of Zeeland are warned to move to high ground. This warning applies particularly to the islands of Tholen, St Philips and Walcheren.’ Grandfather’s hand reached for mine – the only time he ever made an affectionate gesture toward me. We lived in the flattest province of a flat country. There was no high ground for anyone to go to.

In the past, church bells rang to summon the populace in times of danger. The high towers in many villages had saved thousands of lives over the centuries. The Germans had taken the church bells during the war. Few had been replaced. Unless one had a crystal radio, there was no way to hear the warnings. The newfangled machines produced at the Phillips factory in Eindhoven required electricity. Radio Hilversum and the BBC kept on sounding the warning to move to higher ground, into an ether where few people could hear.

‘In the past, church bells rang to summon the populace in times of danger. The high towers in many villages had saved thousands of lives over the centuries. The Germans had taken the church bells during the war’

At eleven o’clock, soft singing rose in the distance. Grandfather hugged me tightly. Mother and Grandmother slept on. The singing turned to yowling. Mother woke when the house started to shake. The last word we heard on the crystal radio before that too died was ‘typhoon’. We were buffeted by winds so strong that some of the houses in the Singel Straat collapsed. The wind screamed and screamed. At midnight it dropped, followed by a profound silence. Then we heard the dykes of Walcheren break, one by one.

Father had somehow managed to find air raid sirens. For the rest of that night, the sirens pealed as Zeeland disappeared under waves more relentless than all the armies that had ever invaded us.

At dawn we looked out of the attic window. Middelburg had more or less survived, but beyond the city there was nothing but water, with an occasional chimney protruding.

‘Now I know there is no God,’ Mother said.

The toll for that night was eighteen hundred lives, half a million head of cattle and the loss of all arable farming land recovered since the war. The hundreds (thousands, I suspect) who died in the next few months, like my father’s parents, of influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts were not included in the statistics.

Father was decorated again for his work saving lives that night and for the subsequent reconstruction of the dykes. He took no joy in this. He railed against the government, blaming them for not rebuilding the dykes properly after the war. Eventually, he lost his job and moved to Australia, a bitter, broken man. He died two years after his arrival. My last memories of him are of surly silences punctuated by gin and cigar smoke. The handsome hero of the war died long before he left the Netherlands.

After his death, Mother should have returned home. She struggled with English, didn’t qualify for an Australian widow’s pension, because we were not citizens, and she was over fifty. If we had returned to the Netherlands after Father died, she would have been given a comfortable pension. Instead, she returned to what she had been in the first place – a servant – cleaning toilets and picking up after the well-heeled of Toorak and South Yarra. One day, one of the ladies she worked for ripped a designer dress. Mother offered to fix it and so began another part of her life, mending and dressmaking. In the school holidays, I was co-opted to unpick seams and sew on buttons.

I nagged her to go home. The longer we stayed, the further the possibility of a Dutch education receded. Her only reply ever was that Europe was finished. The Cold War convinced Mother that the dark times were returning – if they had ever left.

Each week, Mother wrote dutiful letters to her parents in Groede, which were read to them by someone in the village. Letters came back: ‘Your mother says ... your father says …’ Eight years after we arrived in Australia, Mother had saved enough money to return home for a holiday. Back in Australia, she wept for days. Still she refused to go home. I was at university by then, independent. I urged her to return, promising that I would follow later. She visited her parents again in 1971, just before Opa died. She consoled herself that she had seen him at least once more before he died. She continued writing weekly letters to Oma, but the answers became more and more sporadic.

Elisabeth Holdsworth as a child (photograph courtesy of Elisabeth Holdsworth)

In an act of final revenge from the God she had long ago stopped believing in, Mother was killed in a car accident in 1975. The only divine mercy was that she died instantly.

I rang the village pub in Groede and tried to explain who I was. Asking them to fetch Oma. ‘Moeder is dood. Moeder is dood.’ I said into an uncomprehending silence. Finally, someone must have taken pity on the old lady and told her. I heard a wailing Got! Got! then the phone was cut off.

I sent letters to Oma but received no reply. Six years later, the Dutch embassy informed me that Oma had died intestate. I was her sole beneficiary. After Dutch death duties of sixty per cent, I received some three hundred dollars.

The Rue de Commerce, headquarters of the Zeeuws Resistance during the war, is stifling. The heating has been turned on high to thwart the coming winter. As I switch on the television for company, I see that the Dutch Broadcasting Authority has relented: the rededication of Dresden Cathedral is to be shown on television. Overblown singing from the weddingcake cathedral bellows into my room. On another channel there is a documentary about the Dutch coach who will guide the Australian Socceroos into the World Cup.

The Volkskrant has been left in my room. Opposition is rising in the Netherlands to the repressive imigration policies of the present government. In a front-page editorial, my childhood friend, Fritz, now an independent member of parliament, thunders that this is not what our parents fought the war for. Of the group Mother called the Nachgeborenen, Fritz and I are the only ones still alive. Like me, Fritz has developed a close association with a cardiologist.

I turn the television off to gaze outside the hotel room window at the floodlit panorama of the Middelburg Stadhuis through a curtain of snow. The part of me that carries the steely resolve of my Calvinist ancestors warns me not to weep.

Father’s sister, Tante Katrien, died in 2005 at the age of one hundred and five, still on active service to the House of Orange. She left me her titles and worldly goods, including the black pearls and boxes and boxes of memorabilia from eighty-five years of service to the royal family. In her will, Katrien referred to me, as she had always done, as het kind; the Nachgeborenen who wasn’t supposed to survive, much less to sing the songs of the past.

What is a ‘literary life’? The phrase is invitingly open. Some writers seem to live their lives with a studied circumspection, as if creating a work of art. Everything is crafted to present only what the writer wishes to reveal, exactly as in creating a literary work. Oscar Wilde and Jack Kerouac may seem odd bedfellows, except in this one regard. Oscar’s bon mots and flamboyantly witty social gestures mirror those of his written personae, to the extent that his life is his art and his art is his life, exactly as he almost said. Kerouac’s crucial discovery may have been that getting ‘on the road’ could lead not only to a bestseller that influenced a generation, but that it could also shape the perception of his life, where the public and private became synonymous. All the automatic writing of his letters, the photographs of his circle of friends who also people his books, the laconic interviews, even his brooding, photogenic likeness to James Dean, are an integral part of his literary self-creation, intrinsic with a philosophy of staying in a speeding car and observing life from the fast lane. For both Wilde and Kerouac, ‘style’ is the word that links the literary and the life. However different from each other, both are dramatically self-consistent in lifestyles and literary styles.

Picnic is probably Fay Zwicky’s most confident collection. In it she renounces certain kinds of brilliance for a freer and more open style of poetry – what she calls in one poem ‘the grace of candour’. It is a style that approximates moral qualities: honesty, direct ness, kindness to strangers. And it is in fact such moral qualities that give force to this collection. Take the title poem, which starts: ‘On a green sweep of Kings Park grass / dappled with late summer shadow / I joined a picnic with Afghani refugees …’ From this anecdotal beginning, Zwicky works a meditation on what it means to be an outsider:

During the last dozen years of his life, from the initial diagnosis of leukaemia in September 1991 until his death in September 2003, Edward Said continued to lead an astonishingly active life: travelling, lecturing, writing, conversing with seemingly undiminished energy, even as his physical powers sharply declined. When his New York physician gently suggested it might be wise to slow down, he replied that nothing would kill him more quickly than that; boredom seemed a more lethal adversary than the cells invading his body. What kept Said quite literally alive was an unflagging engagement with what he saw to be the most pressing cultural and political issues of his time. That engagement is fully evident in the works that have appeared since his death, such as Humanism and Democratic Criticism and From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map, both published in 2004. On Late Style, another posthumous collection, reflects a further and unsurprising preoccupation throughout these final years. The book explores the manner in which artists and writers often acquire a new idiom or mode of expression – what Said terms a ‘late style’ – during the last stages of their creative lives.

Gough Whitlam was sometimes naughty. Descending in a crowded lift from a conference attended by a number of state parliamentary delegates, he looked down on his fellow passengers and growled ‘pissant state politicians’. It was the sort of remark he liked to get off his chest. In a more deliberative mood, Whitlam, in his 1957 Chifley Memorial Lecture, wrote of state parliamentarians in the following terms: ‘Much can be achieved by Labor members of the state parliaments in effectuating Labor’s aims of more effective powers for the national parliament and for local government. Their role is to bring about their own dissolution.’ These remarks reflect a widespread dissatisfaction with Australia’s ‘colonial’ constitution and with the division of powers between the three tiers of government. The Whitlam government favoured increased powers and responsibilities for both Canberra and local government.

Geoff Page’s latest poetry collection is a wide-ranging survey of some of the issues affecting contemporary Australian life. Underpinning Page’s poems of cafés, apartments, classical music, outback murders and domestic violence is a meditation on approaching mortality and the very idea of belief. In Page’s previous collection, Darker and Lighter (2001), the troubling nature of belief was hinted at in ‘Credo’: ‘The dark-night-of-the-soul-agnostic / prefers the right to doubt. / The world’s too much beset by those / who know what they’re about.’ Five years later, Page’s reflections on belief and the loss thereof return like echoes from a bell. In the fine poem ‘At Tosolini’s’, Page contrasts the diners’ penchant for coffee with the sound of bells ringing at a nearby church: ‘The sound of bells in autumn air / has long since been a thing / that we can never quite believe / and yet we don’t despair.’ Page’s use of the inclusive pronoun ‘we’ assumes much, and perhaps speaks for those who no longer believe.

This book is an account of politics in Sydney during the 1840s and 1850s. Occasionally, the story reaches into the depths of urban life, with descriptions of what Peter Cochrane calls ‘the city’s thick web of political conversation’. But Cochrane is mainly interested in the political leadership, and he has a small number of once celebrated men – William Charles Wentworth, Robert Lowe, Henry Parkes, Charles Cowper and a few others – carrying most of the action.

The latter begins with the meeting in 1843 of the first Australian legislature that might be called representative. There were thirty-six members, and two-thirds were elected on a fairly wide property franchise. The rest, including all the senior members of the government were chosen by the Crown. Wentworth, who represented Sydney, was a leading man from the beginning, and his battle with Governor Gipps accounts for most of the early drama. Arguments were mainly about who was to control the colony’s resources of land and revenue, an important matter for everyone possessed of a little property. Then, during the early 1850s, the colonists were authorised by the British government to draw up a Constitution under which their own elected representatives might take charge of all internal administration. Wentworth was once again the dominant figure, and he wrote the Constitution. The result was responsible government, much as we have today, except that anything resembling foreign affairs (now Canberra’s province) remained an imperial matter.

The trouble about identifying great mistakes in Australian history is that most of them seemed like good ideas at the time. When, for instance, a recent IPA Review identified as one of Australia’s major errors the rejection in 1905 of George Reid’s free-trade federal government in favour of Alfred Deakin’s tariff protectionists, it indulged in anachronistic hindsight. However suited globalisation may be to the geopolitics and technology of the present day, things were different a hundred years ago. Every nation except Great Britain and Turkey used the tariff to protect local capitalists and employees. A whole anthology of ‘great mistakes’ risks deteriorating into a facile exercise in ancestor-bashing.

There are not many ways, I imagine, in which Vivian Smith puts one in mind of Walt Whitman, but one which occurs to me is that Smith’s successive volumes, at least since Tide Country (1982), have been, like Leaves of Grass (1855), a work in progress, in which previous poems reappear, sometimes in modified form, and new work is added, so that the whole corpus is re-presented in different ways over time. Along the Line is the latest, and welcome, incarnation of Smith’s oeuvre. There are fine new poems – never enough for Smith’s admirers – but the bulk of the collection consists of poems from previous collections. Unlike his New Selected Poems (1995) – which was arranged chronologically, with each poem’s provenance declared, book by book, and the new poems coming last – Along the Line does not display the origins of the poems, which makes identification of new ones more difficult. By doing this, Smith draws the reader’s attention away from the idea of development over time and towards contrasts and correspondences between poems from all periods of his career. ‘If you change your city you are sure to change your style,’ Kenneth Slessor is quoted as saying in ‘Twenty Years of Sydney’. I wonder. While it is true that Smith’s poetry has changed over the years, it is also true, as Les Murray has said, that ‘from first to last there is an integral voice’.

Stephen Kelen’s new book is an ambitious, wide and free-ranging journey through past and present, war and peace, family life, travel and technology. It has all the hallmarks of Kelen’s previous books: a marvellous ear and restless eye, a gift for narrative that challenges as much as it reaffirms, and a willingness to tackle anything that takes his attention. These (mostly) narrative poems have a relaxed, conversational style, even when Kelen’s subject matter is bleak and charged with menace: ‘The gun going off / made us laugh till even our / humanity couldn’t give a shit // The police came and went / and we thought about that’ (‘Deadheads’). This relaxed, colloquial style is at the heart of much of the book, and the opening poem, ‘A City’, works as a short, lyrical template for what is to come: rural, urban, celestial, domestic, political, technological. Kelen works a spell and places them all into fourteen lines. It is a tight, promising beginning.

A conversation about an anachronism led Rodney Hall to this new novel, Love without Hope. He acknowledges his wife as the person who informed him that until the 1980s there was a Department of Lunacy in New South Wales, with an asylum superintendent titled the Master of Lunacy.

An innocent replies

Dear Editor,

I agreed with most of Neal Blewett’s stimulating review (‘Innocent abroad’, December 2006–January 2007) of my autobiography, A Thinking Reed. I leave it to others to judge the accuracy of his character analysis and pairing me with Pauline Hanson.

However, I question the article’s proportionality, which exaggerates the political content of A Thinking Reed. Of fifteen chapters, five are personal, five political and five about ideas. The categories are not mutually exclusive: some chapters are chronological, others thematic.

Dr Blewett writes of my account of being Bob Hawke’s Science Minister: ‘He blames everyone but himself’ and is ‘wallowing in self-pity’; and ‘He could rarely bring himself to lower his sights from his often prescient visions to the nitty-gritty of the here and now … He could not be persuaded to prioritise … Above all, in matters of science at least, he lacked any sense of collegiality; his loyalty lay not to the government but to his science constituency.’ Nevertheless, he concedes that my ‘outsider’s assessment’ of the Hawke government is a ‘succinct and balanced assessment’. It is hard to see how all these propositions can be correct.

He also charges that some of my political observations are ‘self-serving’. While any suggestion that an autobiography could be self-serving will shock sensitive readers, mine is less so than most. In ‘Overture’, which set the scene for A Thinking Reed, I wrote:

I was too political to be a fully accepted intellectual, too intellectual to be regarded as an effective politician in the Australian context, conspicuously lacking the killer instinct, too individual and idiosyncratic to be a factional player … Lacking the divine gift of creativity, I recognised that my gifts for understanding and communicating were second order capacities. I am well aware of my deficiencies, things I do not know and cannot do … However, I proved to be a survivor, and many unpopular and unfashionable causes I pushed for ultimately became accepted as part of the conventional wisdom.

I was angered by lost opportunities, but tried to temper my feelings with irony, and absurdity kept breaking through. I tried to be frank but balanced about my failures, and Chapter 11 (‘Ministering to Science’) is full of such references.

Since publication in October, I have read excerpts of the book, many from Chapter 11, to some thousands of listeners in four states and the ACT. The reaction has been very striking – mostly a mixture of hilarity and incredulity. Hundreds of letters and e-mails suggest that readers interpret what I have written in strikingly diverse ways: passages which seem very funny to some are seen as anguished by others, and I am moved that so many correspondents have found my book useful in evaluating their own lives.

Dr Blewett’s personal criticisms of me are very broad, while my criticisms are very precise, or forensic. I criticised scientists as ‘the wimpiest possible lobbyists’ in their own cause (p. 387) and vice chancellors as pusillanimous (p. 369) for failing to defend their own academics over attacks on controversial Australian Research Grants Committee grants. The criticisms were not general, and never understood as such.

Dr Blewett fails to mention my account (pp. 373–74) of how in 1985 I became the first Australian minister (and so far the only one) invited to address a G-7 Summit, to be held in Canada. I thought that the prime minister’s office would be delighted by the honour. In fact, the reaction seemed to be deep irritation: ‘Why him?’ Ultimately, I had to take leave as a minister and pay my own way to Canada. I can see black humour in the incident, and my account is ironic rather than self-pitying. Even so, I am struggling to see how I could blame myself for what happened. The OECD’s favourable review (1986) of my science policies gained me no traction with the Expenditure Review Committee, nor did accolades from Nature. I speculated that that success of Sleepers, Wake! (which Dr Blewett concedes was an ‘important work’) was held against me as a minister.

As ministers in the Hawke government, Neal Blewett and I worked in the same hothouse for seven years, but, unlike mine, his political career was stellar. He learned to play the game according to the new managerial rules – and I did not. After serving as an outstanding Health Minister, he went on to Trade and Social Security, going to London as High Commissioner in 1994.

Health is inevitably a major portfolio, but Australia has not had a dedicated Science ministry since 1987. Health was a huge constituency, and its problems were urgent and personal. Treasury and Finance were never going to challenge Dr Blewett to prioritise between investing in health care for the aged or for the young, or to say, ‘We can invest in cancer research or cardiac research but not both. You choose.’ When the HIV-AIDS epidemic reached Australia, nobody suggested postponing a response for five years. Health insurance funds and the AMA were extremely powerful lobbyists. Every voter had a potential health risk to consider, urgently. Even the toughest Treasury bureaucrat had a mother or a child. It was easy to sell health care as a matter of urgency.

In Science, it was extraordinarily hard to prioritise major issues such as climate change, biotechnology, Antarctica, the social impact of the knowledge economy or population ageing, and it still is. I started talking up greenhouse changes/ climate change in 1985, but the issue was never urgent enough to dominate the political landscape, and the idea that I could say, ‘Well, I’ll drop climate change and concentrate on biotechnology’ sounds like a non sequitur.

The market-driven economic direction adopted by Hawke and Keating in 1983 caused difficulties for my research programs, which were inevitably interventionist, and I was challenging high but groundless optimism that the market would sort out scientific priorities.

Dr Blewett rebukes me for not having achieved more in my first period as national president of the ALP (1992–2000). This is puzzling, because in A Cabinet Diary (1999), he describes me (p. 188) as having been ‘both popular and effective’. My eight years in office were evenly split – half under Paul Keating, half under Kim Beazley. I saw my primary task as trying to pass on to the leadership the views of the party faithful. Keating felt that outside advice was un necessary. After 1996 I tried to persuade Beazley to join with Gary Gray, then national secretary, to promote democratic practice both inside and outside the party, and to weaken the factional stranglehold. I certainly failed in that.

I was encouraged by Dr Blewett’s description of Chapter 15, ‘Years of Exile’, as ‘brilliant’, and intrigued that he disputed the contents of my lists. I erred in not listing Handel’s Julius Caesar and Bizet’s Carmen in my favourite operas, and I should have added films by Pedro Almodóvar and Rolf de Heer.

Barry Jones, Melbourne, Vic.

The missing Kee

Dear Editor,

Did Gay Bilson really review Jenny Kee’s A Big Life at all (December 2006–January 2007)? You would never know it. Even the book’s title is omitted from the review.

Why do I find her lengthy review so distasteful? It reads like a recipe – Kee’s biography as nothing more than a list of its most basic ingredients – with a sensational cast and plot, all described with none of Kee’s stoic, self-deprecating wit or humour. Bilson’s take on Kee’s tone seems callow. Here we have a life reduced by review to a comic strip, without sympathy or compassion. Bilson trivialises Kee’s life as recounted in the autobiography. All she can find to admire are the book’s outstanding production values, surely fitting for an eminent designer’s memoirs

There is no hint of feminist sympathy for a Chinese Australian woman artist who grew up in Australia in the 1950s. Nor does Bilson give even the smallest nod to Kee’s stellar career in creating Australian fashions that were alive to our unique landscape, despite the fact that Kee’s and Linda Jackson’s designs are collected worldwide by museums including the Victoria and Albert Museum, and by fellow couturiers in Paris and Milan. Bilson ignores Kee’s account of her creative life and of the high personal toll of her success. There is no mention of the honesty with which Kee reveals the tragedy in her personal life, and its consequences. Kee’s environmental activism and the detailed account of her spiritual journey are also mocked in Bilson’s reductive approach.

When will Australian artists be civilised and generous enough to celebrate each other’s achievements without bitterness and resentment? Is there such a gulf between the worlds of high feasting and high fashion? Do Bush Culture (Flamingo Park) and Oz Cuisine (Berowra Waters) have nothing in common? Gay Bilson might have learned something from this brave publication. Readers might even find this book witty and informative, but one would never glean this from the review.

How much of the book did Jenny Kee write? Bilson meanly suggests that Kee played only a small role. Surely working with a co-writer implies more engagement in the difficult process of writing an autobiography than is acknowledged here? In fact, Kee has worked on this book for ten years.

In the same issue of ABR, Peter Rose reviewed with insightful attention two current biographies: Clive James’s North Face of Soho: Unreliable Memoirs and Robert Hughes’s Things I Didn’t Know. Surely A Big Life, written by a woman who was in London and Australia at roughly the same time, demanded more thorough and comprehensive attention.

Juno Gemes, Hawkesbury River, NSW

Gay Bilson replies:

Dear Editor,

In Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a character says, ‘I wanted to be judged, do you see? It’s what we all want, isn’t it? I wanted, oh, some kind of summing up, I wanted my life looked at. We don’t get that, not unless we appear in court or are given the once-over by a psychiatrist, neither of which had come my way and I wasn’t exactly disappointed, seeing as I wasn’t a criminal or a nutter. No, I’m a normal person, and I just wanted what a lot of people want. I wanted my life looked at ...’

More books than ever are being read, but not books by people for whom writing itself is a creative act. Ingenuous self-absorption, when bereft of literary talent, gets the better of the printed word. The juxtaposition of the private with legitimate public histories easily turns personal triumphs and tragedies into farce. In making a précis of A Big Life, I followed Jenny Kee’s juxtapositions and often quoted Kee’s words.

What is it exactly that laying oneself out for public consumption achieves, both for the teller and for the reader? Kee’s creative output as a designer and her dogged drive have never been in doubt, and have always been on the record.

My impulse as a reviewer is not towards denigration of a life. It is towards the book which is under review and not that life, however much the telling depends on the experience.

Bernard Williams began his philosophical life as the enfant terrible of mainstream English philosophy. In 2003 he died its most eminent contemporary figure. Williams was White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford from 1990 to 1996, and a professor at Berkeley from 1988 until his death. Both these books are collections of essays, nearly all published previously, but many not easily accessible. In addition to three general essays about classical Greek philosophy, The Sense of the Past has essays on Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; and then on Descartes, Hume, Henry Sidgwick, Nietzsche, R.G. Collingwood, and Wittgenstein. The essays in Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline are collected under the headings of ‘Metaphysics and Epistemology’, ‘Ethics’, and ‘The Scope and Limits of Philosophy’. In both volumes, the essays range across Williams’s philosophical life, affording a picture both of his recurring preoccupations and of the evolution of his concerns.

George Orwell begins Homage to Catalonia with a description of an Italian militiaman whom he encounters briefly at the Lenin Barracks in Barcelona as he is about to join up.

He was a rough looking youth of twenty-five or six, with reddish yellow hair and powerful shoulders … Something in his face deeply moved me … I hardly know why, but I have seldom seen anyone – any man I mean – to whom I have taken such an immediate liking … As we went out, he stepped across the room and gripped my hand very hard. Queer the affection you can feel for a stranger! It was as though his spirit and mine had momentarily succeeded in bridging the gulf of language and tradition and meeting in utter intimacy.

There is certainly a refreshing candour in My Story and a good deal of pleasant anecdote and humour, but, on the whole, not a lot of ferocity. Cosgrove is most at ease and most readable when he can be convincingly diffident, mocking his own pretensions or, more often, the embarrassing lack of them, as in his account of his arrival at Duntroon Military College. Just short of eighteen, with a ‘lot of growing up to do, both physically and emotionally’, coming off a modest performance in his second try at the Leaving Certificate, with a school track record of larrikin insouciance, the young Peter Cosgrove had every reason to feel nervous as he boarded the bus outside the Canberra station for the short trip to Duntroon. Finding he is sitting next to ‘a fellow who seemed about my age (although years more mature)’, Cosgrove decides to ‘break the ice’. As a result, he discovers that this young man is a product of one of Sydney’s most prestigious private schools, that he had been school captain, a senior cadet, captained the School XV and had been selected for the combined GPS rugby team. Despondently, Cosgrove asks about cricket, assessing himself as ‘no world beater [but] better [at cricket] than at rugby’. His delight in hearing that his companion never played the game is quickly snuffed out when the young man explains that, as stroke of the school eight when his school won the Head of the River, he had no time for cricket. ‘We sat in silence for a moment and then he turned to me and said, “What about you?” I said morosely, “I’m on the wrong bus!”’

Seeing these two anthologies side by side in that obscure corner allocated to poetry by so many bookshops, a casual browser might note that both begin with Robert Adamson’s ‘A Visitation’ and conclude that uniformity rules and one volume will suffice. Not so: a full savouring of the past year’s poetic crop requires both. In fact, ‘A Visitation’ is the only poem common to both selections. Certainly, they share poets – and it is among these twenty that readers are likely to recognise ‘established’ names such as Alan Gould, Kate Llewellyn, Jan Owen, Peter Porter, Philip Salom (all in their egalitarian alphabetical order), but in each case the particular poem selected is different. Beyond that, there is substantial variation in the selection of poets: nineteen of Beveridge’s forty poets don’t appear among the eighty-two present in Porter’s more extensive volume.

‘Nothing bad has ever happened in the last 218 years of European settlement – and if anything ever did, it has been inflated out of all proportion by self-serving lefty academics.’ The perpetually angry right-wing commentators that dominate the so-called ‘history wars’ would never write anything so crass, but that is the message which appears to permeate the ‘three cheers’ school of Australian history supported by the present neo-liberal establishment. In contrast, recent contributors to Australian Historical Studies (AHS) provide a more nuanced version of Australian history that transcends pointless debates about the ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ of the past. In general, the essayists seek to understand past realities rather than to pass judgment on historical actors and their eras. Race is one of the strongest themes in both issues of AHS. David Walker’s ‘Strange Reading’ (No. 128) is a well-written assessment of Keith Windschuttle’s The White Australia Policy (2004). Walker shows that by ignoring key evidence and through selected use of edited historical quotations, Windschuttle has constructed a bogus Australian past in which racist attitudes towards Asia represented a minimal part of the national story. Gillian Cowlishaw (No. 127) also tackles the history wars and the construction of national myths. Cowlishaw stresses the importance of creating Aboriginal history that reflects the personalities and values of the participants: ‘Indigenous Australians remain shadows in the scholar’s margins, passive recipients of “our” actions in the past and “our” regrets in the present.’ This problem can be hard to rectify, because the public record has a tendency to focus on European attempts to ‘manage’ the indigenous ‘issue’; the perceptions of indigenous people regarding cultural change and continuities are not always sufficiently documented, even in recent times.

Here we have one brand new literary journal, Etchings, and one which, by comparison, is practically geriatric: Famous Reporter. There is now a proliferation of literary journals, and SPUNC (Small Press Underground Networking Community) has emerged to advance their cause. We know that mainstream publishing is producing less diverse material, and that it is increasingly not Australian. The vast majority of publishing in Australia, as Michael Wilding has highlighted, is now done by local branches of big transnational corporations. Malcolm Knox has revealed the ‘governing management principles’ of such organisations. These include ‘segmentation and internal competition’: whereas in the past a publisher subsidised ‘book sections’, now a publisher will say ‘each of these books is a discrete unit and is at war with each other unit, and if the CSIRO Diet Book does well, we will reward the diet books section with the money to repeat that success. And if the poets continue to languish, we’ll have no more poetry.’ Poetry, of course, was effectively given the flick by mainstream publishers Penguin and OUP in the 1990s. As Mark Davis says, publishers are now akin to gamblers who ‘back winners’. This may always have been true, but now they’re putting more money on the favourites and none on the roughies. In this environment, literary journals that publish poetry are crucial to maintaining a diverse local literary culture.

Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox with a subscription form.

From the mid-nineteenth century, the city of Florence and its surrounding hills were home to a large expatriate community in which the British were both prominent and visible – in the English tearooms and English pharmacy, in the waiting rooms of the English doctors and bankers, in the pews of the English Church. The foreigners came to live in a better climate and at less expense, to discover the world and themselves, to write, paint, collect, to escape the restraints – or the failures – of home, and to live unorthodox and unconventional lives. Aldous Huxley, whose enthusiasm for Florence was brief, wrote of this cultural mecca as ‘a third-rate provincial town, colonized by English sodomites and middle-aged Lesbians’. Despite, or because of, Huxley’s view, this English colony and its denizens, who more than adequately memorialised themselves, continue, like Bloomsbury, to be a popular and marketable publishing commodity. In his recent contribution on Florence to The Writer and the City series, David Leavitt suggested that Florence was unusual in that its most famous citizens for at least the past one hundred and fifty years have been foreigners. He then went on to make the foreigners the subject of his biography of the city, Florence: A Delicate Case (2002).

Filial Calibrations

In December we reported on the Inaugural Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, which was won by Elisabeth Holdsworth. We feel sure that ABR readers will enjoy Ms Holdsworth’s essay, ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’, which we publish in full this issue. That is her mother on our front cover. The unfolding story of ‘Mother’s’ removal as a girl from her home in the countryside, of her marriage into a privileged family with close ties to Dutch royalty, and of her betrayal and subsequent incarceration in Dachau during World War II, is not easily forgotten.

A number of books have been published of late that theorise the function of literature in contemporary society (a trend indicative of an anxiety about literature in public culture, which is itself worth speculating on). In Why We Read Fiction: Theory of the Mind and the Novel (2006), Lisa Zunshine argues that reading provides us with cognitive practice for our lives as social beings, in which we are called upon to interact with and interpret others. Characterisation, then, would seem to be an important component of the appeal and function of a text. Henry James recognised the importance of character to narrative long ago. In his famous essay, ‘The Art of Fiction’, he asked: ‘What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?’

Bibliomania is a disease that has afflicted men, and occasionally women, in many walks of life. Some of the most famous cases have been extremely wealthy bachelors, like Richard Heber in England and David Scott Mitchell in Australia, whose only interest in life was collecting books and manuscripts. At the other end of the spectrum have been men who were leaders in business, the professions or politics, yet who still had the time, energy and money to amass huge collections. Sir John Ferguson in Australia, John Pierpont Morgan and Henry Huntington in America, William Gladstone in England and Sir George Grey in New Zealand fall into the latter category.

The publication of a third major book on Howard Arkley begs the question: does he deserve such attention while other Australian artists of his generation and significance remain invisible on bookshop and library shelves? Has Arkley’s untimely and sensationalised death in 1999 been the main driver behind his broad appeal, or is he an artist who warrants further critical investigation? John Gregory’s impressive book, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, proves unquestionably that the latter is the case, and tackles some of the myths that have been perpetuated, especially since the artist’s death.

An Australian Republic presents itself as the book to reopen the republic debate – a defibrillator for our body politic. It turns out, however, to be another example of the lazy argument that marks much of Australia’s progressive discourse. It answers to nothing but its own echo chamber. Meaningless sentences such as ‘Australia is a nation of multiple and changing identities; a moving kaleidoscope of diverse and colourful images’ abound; baseless statements – such as ‘for many of those immigrants … a constitutional system that identified both structurally and symbolically with Australia’s British origins was incompatible, unfamiliar, and indeed alien’ – are supported with the barest of evidence (the quote’s footnote refers readers to an article in Feminist Review entitled ‘The Republic is a Feminist Issue’). Inconsistencies stick out like bookmarks: John Howard’s narrowly economic definition of Australianness ‘promotes a distinctive and exclusively white, male-orientated, Brito-centric identity’. True, perhaps, but this could equally be said about other conceptions of Australian identity presented, without censure, on the preceding page.

In this tongue-in-cheek version of world history, Jesus Christ was originally baby Warren, until a celebrity representative came knocking at the manger door to help spin Mary’s unlikely tale of immaculate conception. Jonathan Biggins has examined world events from an Australian perspective, from the dawn of time, when God beat out Satan as chairgod in a narrow recount, to the reign of the pioneering environmentalist Robin Hood, to a rather subdued meeting of the Millenium Doomsday Cult. Through the imposition of modern bureaucracy onto historical events, As It Were lambastes the red tape and political correctness that stifle modern society. We discover that the works of Dickens do not translate well to adaptation by magical lantern, since there are not enough prospects for sequels; Monet is blighted by the cost of absinthe, as the tax auditor refuses to allow it as a tool of trade, and the first run of Kitty Hawk is delayed while the Wright Brothers apply to occupy limited airspace.

Writings on globalisation have so far been of three principal types. First came the fables of discovery: bold, confident and romantic. Next came the stories of resistance: variously decrying the consequences of the new order, or denying that there was anything particularly novel about this globalisation malarkey. More recently, however, we have entered the age of elaboration. These fresher writings extend the now familiar idea of globalisation onto new terrains. Just as concepts such as ‘space’, ‘postmodernism’ and ‘the body’ were once taken up by earnest specialists, so the idea of ‘globalisation’ is now used to revive tired topics and to attract jaded publishers. Bookshelves groan under the weight of fresh volumes promising to disclose the secrets of ‘globalisation and food/sport/religion/sex/politics etc.’. Thus the concept has itself been exported and capitalised on a remarkable, networked industry. Some of this work is opportunistic and shallow. Fortunately, however, Anthony Elliott and Charles Lemert’s entry to the field (which might be retitled ‘Globalisation and Individualism and Emotions’) attempts to say something new, serious and important.

The Apparition at Large is Black Pepper’s managing director K.F. Pearson’s second outing as the commentating enigma, most recently encountered in The Apparition’s Daybook (1995). Opening poems map the identity’s regular ‘haunts’ – the bars and cafés of inner-Melbourne – via evocative sketches of daily life’s unexpected sensuality: ‘A colour can completely drench our consciousness.’ Transient comforts and pleasures, while lingered upon, are undercut by the apparition’s humiliating invisibility and insubstantiality.

‘I wonder this wall can bear the weight of such words’
Graffiti on a wall in Pompeii

The city is smaller than you expected.
Its houses turn their backs on streets –

       And given half a chance
       who wouldn’t bunker down behind a stack of silence?
       An arm’s length of wall permits any depth
       of meditative calm or your money back –

Its walls are made of potsherds, broken bricks and stone
cut from the hill’s mouth, chain-lugged to the city –

       It happened just as you picture it:
       slaves bent double against the weight, whip cracks and flies,
       that crowd in the marketplace breaking off mid-sentence
       to see peace dragged in as a pile of stones –

The stucco of the city walls is everywhere
scratched with these piss-riddled importunities –

       – Cruel Lalagus, why don’t you love me?

A wall can bear the weight

       – All the girls love Celadus the Gladiator
The weight is nothing to the wall
      – Caesius faithfully loves M[… name lost]
A wall can bear the weight
      – For a good time, turn right at the end of the street

Out of the dark, ashes fall softly.
We have to stand up again and again to shake them off.
What a weight of light!
The dark is smaller than you expected.

I put away my eyes for the night.
I forget dreams,
perhaps I don’t have them any more,
not close at hand.
I’m not book-sick from the gloomy others.
I haven’t read a word in years.
In me, drink-nettles – I’ve a glass with the same stings,
and ice which comes out as clear sweat on
this side of my skin,
the right-way-up for drying.

‘They make a desert and call it peace.’
Calgacus, on the Romans, AD 83

How will they remember us, the dead?
As a cause – a just cause – or simply an end?

And when we, like traces of shooting
stars, have visited our stripes upon the world

and in our turn are gone, how will we
be remembered by those who follow, those who

will have overcome us? The victors
who write also read the history of their

conquests. Will they read this: that we who
began with the word liberty in our mouths

ended with blood on our hands? That we
who surrendered freedom for security

lost both? That we fell into line with
history, and like others before turned brutal

with wealth and power and self-interest?
There are those alive now who will die of us,

each cancelling out a sacrifice
by one who fought to save us from empires.

Who will save us from ourselves?

Ben Hills’s biography of Princess Masako has a second subtitle: The Tragic True Story of Japan’s Crown Princess. It is a taste of the work to come, of both the hyperbole and the author’s tendency to explain everything to the reader. But then, the book is promoted not as a serious biography but as a ‘romance gone wrong’. Written by a Fairfax investigative reporter, it reads like an extended feature article, with the historical strands teased out but little empathy with its main characters.

1980: a red-haired girl in my Year Ten art class at John Gardiner High School asked me if I knew there was a radio station that only played ‘that new wave music’. She said it with a measure of contempt in her voice – for me and for it. But I was tempted, and soon became part of 3RRR’s small, staunch audience. A quarter of a century on comes Mark Phillips’s lively, if listy (though no more than Ken Inglis’s ABC histories) narrative of this Melbourne institution’s first thirty years.

Miriam Estensen is prodigious. It is only a year since I reviewed her Life of George Bass (2005) in ABR, and here is another well-researched historical volume, out in time to mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the Spanish expedition, which inter alia made the first European passage through the Torres Strait.

On Valentine’s Day, the State Library of Victoria will host its third literary speed-dating dinner, an event that makes explicit something that has long been implicit in contemporary courtship chatter: you can judge a lover by their book. Participants in these events have about three minutes to impress each potential partner with the one book they brought along for show-and-tell. At the first such dinner, one man brought along The Story of O, which at least made it clear that he was there for a good time, if not a long one.

John Waller is a science historian at the University of Melbourne, and his new book is a study of the life and times of one Robert Blincoe. Though he is hardly a household name, Blincoe’s career is interesting in that he is the first factory worker in Britain’s Industrial Revolution whose biography can be reconstructed in some detail.