I have often admired the mystical way of Pythagoras, and the secret magic of numbers.
Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici

The real world is not given to us, but put to us by way of a riddle.
Albert Einstein

In the kitchen of my mother’s houses there has always been a wooden stand with a small notepad and a hole for a pencil. I say small because these notepads are tiny, no bigger than a grown man’s palm. The pencils are short and have been sharpened in the same way all these years – with a kitchen knife, not a pencil sharpener – giving them an individual squarish-shaped lead point.

I am looking for paper on which to note down the title of a book I have recommended to my mother. Forty-odd years since my earliest memories of the kitchen pad and pencil, five houses later, on a different continent, the current paper and pencil look the same as they always did. Surely it can’t be the same pencil? The pad, now I look at it, is more modern than those of my childhood; it is lined, and the paper is thicker and creamier. But the grubby wooden stand is definitely the original one, made by my father with the tools that sit in a box in my mother’s shed.

‘I can’t believe you still use these scribbly pencils,’ I say to my mother, walking back into the living room with a sheet of paper and the pencil. ‘Can’t you afford a pen?’ I flinch as I hear impatience or judgement in my voice.

My mother replies a little sharply, ‘It works perfectly well.’

‘Yes, it does. I’m just amazed you still have the same pad and pencil holder after all these years.’

‘Oh yes, I’ve always kept it in the kitchen. I never knew when I might want to make a note of an idea, and I was always in the kitchen in those days.’

Immediately I picture her, hair wild, blue housecoat covered in flour, a wooden spoon in one hand, the pencil in the other, her mouth moving silently. My mother smiles and says, ‘One day I was making shepherd’s pie and I had a marvellous thought, but the stand was empty. One of the children must have taken the paper. I was mincing the lamb and boiling potatoes and watching baby Pauline, so I just grabbed the bread board and wrote it all down on the back. It turned out to be a real breakthrough for solving the problem I was working on.’

This story – which happened before I was born – reminds me how remarkable my mother was, and is. I feel embarrassed that I complain about not having enough child-free time to work. Later, when my mother is in the bathroom, I go into her kitchen and turn over the wooden breadboards (she has three). Sure enough, on the back of the smallest one are some scribbled marks and indentations that I recognise as mathematics. Those symbols have travelled unscathed through fifty years, rooted in the soil of a cheap wooden breadboard, invisible exhibits at every meal.

Why have I never heard this story? Or was I told it before, only to forget?

‘Forty-five, forty-three, forty-one.’

‘Look, Ben, a cat!’

‘That cat lives at number thirty-nine.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Thirty-seven, mystery – number thirty-five on the house.’

Four years ago, Ben and I walked this way almost every day. It was quiet on the streets. It seemed that only Ben loved to visit the dull little park with dirty climbing equipment and wobbly swings.

‘Thirty-three, thirty-one, twenty-nine.’

‘Look Ben! Nasturtiums on the verge.’ They blossomed with abandon, dark red, orange, yellow, cream with pale red stripes. Huge leaves tipped from side to side in the breeze. ‘There are lots of cabbage moths and snails here. If you ever want to find snails, nasturtiums are good for that,’ I explained.

‘What do I do if I find snails?’

‘I don’t know, I just mean if you wanted to look at one.’

‘Why do I want to look at one?’

‘Because they’re interesting. Kids like snails.’

‘Why do kids like snails?’

‘They like to watch them.’

‘Why do they like to watch them?’

‘Never mind, Ben. What’s the next number?’

‘Twenty-seven,’ he sang joyfully. Oh miraculous discovery, another letterbox, another number.

The park: a small oval of grass, a few trees, a basketball hoop, climbing frame, swing, litter, broken water fountain, sun glinting on flowers.

‘Look, Ben – lovely daisies.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Lots.’

‘How many lots?’

‘Oh, I don’t know, hundreds I guess.’

‘I think there are actually eighty hundred and forty daisies.’

‘Maybe.’

He picked one and counted the petals, then handed it to me before trotting to the swing.

‘Can I swing from one hundred to one?’

‘Okay.’

‘One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight …’

Under the swing were woodchips. As I pushed the swing, I saw each chip was a different size and shape. Even the colour varied. My vision narrowed to see details. Like Ben, I could see the difference in sameness.

‘Sixty-six, sixty-five, sixty-four.’

The count went on.

We walked on, home and park, home and park, letterbox after letterbox, the only way to keep Ben happy. Pavements, numbers, flowers, weeds, smells of spring met us as we passed. The world shrank to the pair of us. To the seed pods cracking under our feet, to the blond grass heads haloed in the sun, soft as baby skin. There was no time before now. I had only ever known this – these walks, the pointless looping of feet over earth, days and days, time and again. To dwell within a labyrinth of the mind, of Ben’s mind, always circuiting, never arriving. The absence of shared meaning.

‘There was no time before now. I had only ever known this – these walks, the pointless looping of feet over earth, days and days, time and again’

When we were young, Olivia and I played a game called ‘spot the mathematician’. It started at Heathrow. We were about to fly to Helsinki with our parents to an international mathematical congress, so we knew there would be mathematicians on the plane. As the passengers walked down the gangway, we took it in turns to decide whether they were mathematicians or not.

‘He’s one,’ Liv would whisper. ‘Look at his clothes.’

Then it was my turn. ‘Look, he sat in the wrong seat – must be one!’

Sometimes we were unsure. ‘What do you think, Grace?’ Liv would ask. ‘He kind of looks too neat and moves too fast.’

‘No, he’s not one of ours. He’s got a newspaper under his arm.’

We focused on the men, because we knew that our own mother was only one of a small number of female mathematicians. But occasionally we’d see a woman who looked unusual enough for us to consider her a possible candidate. Experience suggested that normal-looking women weren’t mathematicians, at least not British ones.

We didn’t know much about Finland before we touched down in Helsinki, except that it was the birthplace of Sibelius. At the end of the week’s congress we knew little more, just that Finland was famous for cloudberries. While our parents attended the conference, we went on the ‘wives and children’ tours. We were used to this and usually managed to attach ourselves to some kindly woman who would keep an eye on us and make sure we got lunch. This was what my mother would say to me each morning as she left the motel room: ‘Be good, look after Olivia and make sure you both get a good lunch.’

It was at the congress dinner that Liv and I perfected our maths stereotype. As soon as the food arrived, it seemed that every mathematician made a beeline for the buffet and grabbed all he could. It was the first time all week we had seen them stop talking. From then on, a type of animal hunger was added to our list of mathematical traits.

Overheard, a boy talking to his older sister:

‘Look, there’s that boy Ben from school I told you about. He knows all the times tables and he’s only in year one!’

‘Although my mother was a gifted and successful mathematician, it never crossed my mind that I would follow in her footsteps’

Although my mother was a gifted and successful mathematician, it never crossed my mind that I would follow in her footsteps. From an early age, I had a clear sense that I was in some way fundamentally different from both of my parents and that mathematical ability was one of the key markers of this difference. As a child, I felt as if I was outside an invisibly marked space and was without knowledge of the key that would permit me to enter it. I felt that at least two of my siblings had the ability to slip in and out of this place, because at times they seemed to understand what my parents meant. Of course, I understood the words my parents spoke, but it seemed that the unspoken meanings – what I would now call the subtext of their discourse – was lost on me. As I became older and more critical, I began to realise that my parents weren’t ‘normal’. My difference from them became a matter of being ordinary, not odd. Into my twenties, I naïvely held onto this dichotomy of odd versus ordinary, mathematical versus non-mathematical, and (perhaps without realising it) intelligent (them) versus stupid (me). Even after I moved on from this simplistic view, mathematics still functioned as the symbol of my difference from my parents.

And then I had Ben.

‘You need to deal with his stimming now, before it gets worse.’ The psychologist was young and definite.

I felt angry and wanted to say: don’t tell me what to do. Instead, I said, ‘We don’t use the terms “stimming” or “obsession”. We think of numbers as a strong interest of Ben’s.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But would you say that Ben’s interest in numbers is preventing him from being interested in other things – in people, in learning other games and so on?’

‘He’s not interested in other things, no.’

‘So …’ I could hear a note of triumph in her tone and felt sure she didn’t like me much. ‘Let’s talk about how we can reduce the number obs … interest.’

This was when she explained our options: extinguishment, quarantine or integration. It didn’t seem to strike her that the words themselves made this seem like a punishment. The choices boiled down to: forbid Ben access to numbers (how, I wondered?); limit his access; or turn his interest into something more ‘functional’. The thing was that I agreed with her but couldn’t bear to remove from Ben his life-blood, the only meaningful thing in his life.

‘But numbers aren’t meaningful, are they?’ she said.

Overheard, one sister talking to the other:

‘I know, I do exactly the same. I count the steps of every stairway; I count every slice I make when I cut up a banana; I always notice car number plates and bus numbers. I’ve always done it.’

One of our delights as children was to play with five boxes of buttons my mother kept in her sewing cupboard. They were mostly old chocolate boxes made of tin, with pictures of fluffy cats and idealised dogs on them. Each one was full of buttons that we could tip onto the floor. The five boxes were graduated by size, which corresponded to the size of the buttons inside. The largest box contained the largest buttons, and so on. I liked the smallest box, which was actually a white cardboard box with flowers on it and which still smelt faintly of something sweet and slightly exotic – vanilla perhaps. In this box there was a cute ladybird button, a brass squirrel and several transparent buttons that were curled up into cylinders, as people did with their tongues for fun. These were my favourites. I loved the feel of the buttons running through my fingers when I tipped them from hand to hand or placed them inside their square white home.

It was a surprise to see the button boxes again one day when Ben and I visited my mother. I hadn’t realised that she had kept them.

‘Children love buttons,’ said my mother. She was right; even Ben got interested in them. He was four years old at the time and we were struggling to find anything that would amuse him. He certainly didn’t play like other children. But the buttons were perfect for him because he could lay them out on the rug, grouping them by size or colour and matching any that looked the same. He understood the size distinctions, too. He even made my mother label each box with a number, so that the largest buttons were in box one and the smallest in box five. Strangely, he too liked the transparent tongue-curled buttons best.

I remember that visit well, because after Ben had finished with the buttons, my mother found several other activities for him: smelling each of her perfume bottles, counting and reading the names on her long row of herb and spice jars, placing a single soft toy on each of her wooden steps (this made me nervous because of the gaps between each step and Ben’s soft floppy body), and finally banging away on the piano and learning the name of each note. As my mother and I sat drinking tea to the sound of the piano-bashing, we were both in awe, me of my mother’s ability to amuse Ben, and her of Ben’s intelligence and memory.

‘He can read all those spice jars,’ she said. ‘He even remembered “cardamom” and words like that. Has he seen those at home?’

‘Ah, no.’ The idea of me managing to cook with spices at that stage of my life was laughable.

‘He understands size and categories with the buttons. And he seems quite musical.’

‘Maybe.’

Personally, I didn’t think that hitting random keys of the piano constituted musicality but I guessed that my mother – like me – was still coming to terms with the idea of Ben being autistic. She wanted to focus on his abilities, not his disabilities.

Then my mother said, ‘You know, Grace, you can’t really call Ben handicapped. He just has a very particular genetic inheritance.’

When my parents talked about mathematics, they often stood in the kitchen. Or rather, my mother moved around preparing dinner, and my father bounced up and down on a small square of floor in front of the most useful cupboard. As they talked about quadratic equations or topological vector spaces, my mother would gently push my father to one side so that she could reach inside the cupboard, and after she had closed the cupboard he would hop back in front of it. If he was only mildly excited or interested, he would just do his hop, balancing first on his right foot and then moving the left beside it for a quick step, before moving back to the left again. If the conversation was going well, my father would occasionally tap his forehead with the back of his right hand. When things heated up, he would add a left-handed slap to the back of his head just before the right hand hit the forehead, creating a kind of chain reaction. As the dinner neared preparation, there would be a flurry of activity in that kitchen, my mother stirring pots and lifting things out of the oven (she was feeding seven every night), and my father bouncing and hopping, slapping and tapping. Just when the conversation and the dinner were reaching a head, my mother would dash out into the passage and ring an old cow’s bell she had picked up in Switzerland, and one of us kids would dart into the kitchen, dodging wordlessly between my parents to collect the cutlery to lay the dining-room table. A few minutes later, the bell would go again, signalling time to eat and a temporary end to the mathematical dialogue.

‘There is a game that some parents of autistic children play, where they try to determine from which side of the family the autism has come’

There is a game that some parents of autistic children play, where they try to determine from which side of the family the autism has come. This blame game is an alternative to the vaccination, birth trauma or toxic chemical blame routines. One mother I met told me that she feels guilty because the autism must have come from her family as she has a cousin with autism and her husband doesn’t know of any autistic people in his family.

‘But does it matter? I mean, do you need to know, even if you could?’ I asked her.

‘I feel bad,’ she said. ‘If it wasn’t for me, my husband could have had a normal child.’

Robert and I have never played this game. I didn’t see the need to find or create a ‘reason’ for Ben being who he is. Nonetheless, it’s hard not to notice aspects of my own family’s behaviour that verges on the autistic spectrum. In one of the first books about autism that I read – a book full of depressing statistics and unwelcome generalisations – I saw the sentence: ‘the presence of odd family members … as well as very mathematically bright, but socially awkward relatives, are more frequent in families with an autistic child’ (Seigel). I also distinctly remember reading and telling Robert that of all parental occupations the coupling with the statistically highest likelihood of having a child or grandchild with autism is that of two mathematicians. I remember reading this – even the shape of the print on the page – but now I can’t find the reference anywhere. Did I make it up? Did I need a reason for Ben’s autism after all? Even if I did make it up, now I know that it is roughly accurate, because recent research has shown that mathematicians have a higher rate of autistic spectrum conditions than the general population, and that the fathers and grandfathers of children with autistic conditions are twice as likely to work as scientists, mathematicians and engineers than the parents of non-autistic children (Baron-Cohen et al.).

When I suggested to my sister, Megan, that perhaps our father had a few mild autistic-like traits, she said, ‘No, he wasn’t like that.’

‘Wasn’t he?’ I asked. ‘I always thought him a little unusual.’

‘Oh no,’ she replied, quite upset. ‘I don’t think of him that way.’

I changed the subject. I didn’t say to her that the thought of something of my father travelling through me to my son was a comfort to me, a feeling that Ben is not such an outsider in the world after all.

Ben’s love of numbers is both mystical and pedestrian. It is unrelenting, ever-present. Not a day goes by when Ben doesn’t count or talk about or write down numbers. The literature on autism describes Ben’s love of numbers as ‘a preoccupation with a stereotyped and restricted pattern of interest that is abnormal in intensity and focus’ (DSM IV). Psychologists have described his behaviour as ‘obsessional’, ‘compulsive’ and ‘ritualised’. I prefer to call him ‘passionate’.

‘Ben’s love of numbers is both mystical and pedestrian. It is unrelenting, ever-present. Not a day goes by when Ben doesn’t count or talk about or write down numbers’

What can it mean to have a passion for numbers? Mainly, Ben just loves the physical shape and form of numbers. Whatever size or colour or font or material a number is made of or written in, he dotes on zero to nine, just as I adore every inch of his body, every expression of his face.

This is how Ben’s passion started. Some time before he was two, I stuck on the wall a child’s poster with the numbers one to twenty and illustrations to match. I put it up because it was colourful and the hallway was dingy. I read it to Ben once. He spent a long time looking at it that day, and the next day, and the day after. Then he wanted to ‘hold’ the numbers. So I made some numbers out of coloured pipe cleaners. These became his most treasured possessions. He laid them on the floor one after another, saying the numbers as he did, ‘one, two, three’ and so on up to twenty. Then he started going beyond twenty. When he came to numbers requiring two of the same digit, like twenty-two, he used his hand for the second number. How did he know how to count beyond twenty? This I don’t know. It seemed to be innate. A two-year-old unable to eat with a spoon, uninterested in toys and calling himself ‘you’ instead of ‘I’ was able to count to one hundred and beyond. His face was rapt when he used the pipe cleaners for this purpose. He laid them down with such reverence it was like a form of worship. He was so content I could have gazed at his counting face for hours.

After the pipe cleaners, Ben discovered the joys of birthday cake candles shaped like numbers. But they broke too easily when he played with them, so we found plastic magnetic numbers in the toyshop. He collected hand-written numbers on paper, numbers cut from wrapping paper, golden cardboard numbers, a set of metal numbers from the hardware store intended to be used on letterboxes, numbers for use in the bath, numbers made of play dough, shells that ‘could be a six or upside could be a nine’. And so it went, a cupboard full of sets of numbers, as if collecting the objects were the sole purpose of his life.

Over a period of months, Ben’s interest developed. He began to love numbers in a second way, for what they represented, just as a mother will love best the photographs of her children that remind her of happy times; that numbers on letterboxes tell us the number of the house, the age we are tells who is older than whom, that numbers can represent so many different things – weight, height, currency, size. Clocks, calculators, thermometers and measuring tapes were all added to his collection.

‘He’ll grow out of it,’ my friends told me.

‘He’s so intelligent,’ my family said.

‘Your parents are mathematicians,’ people reminded me. ‘What did you expect?’

What did I expect? We expect many things of our children. Most of the time we are only aware of these expectations when something happens to make it impossible for them to be fulfilled.

Just as Robert and I were thinking that we should start to teach Ben arithmetic, he discovered it for himself. He discovered a third way to enjoy numbers: the way they work. That one plus one equals two and then two plus one equals three made sense to him. He began to do strange feats of simple arithmetic. He spent hours adding numbers in his head. ‘Two plus two is four; four plus four is eight; forty-four plus forty-four is eighty-eight.’

Soon after that, I would hear him reciting the times tables to himself in bed at six in the morning, starting with ‘one two is two’ and ending with ‘twelve twelves are one hundred and forty-four’, complete with the intonation and accent from Don Spencer’s musical times tables tape which I had foolishly played to him once. This may have led him to a fourth way of loving numbers – as an ordering principle. Numbers are predictable and controllable and they never end. He realises you can count forever.

‘Numbers are predictable and controllable and they never end. He realises you can count forever.’

At several points in my schooling I began to fail maths tests. At first I kept it a secret, but after a while my mother magically knew I was struggling. I don’t know if she recognised my failing-maths-shame or if my teachers or one of my sisters told her. At any rate, she would choose a time when we were alone together (a fairly rare occurrence in my family) and ask me how I was going with my maths and was there anything I wanted to tell her. I soon realised that this was the cue to get my maths book and show her my latest test results. She would then put aside some time to work with me on my homework.

‘It’s just a matter of understanding it,’ she would say. ‘Once I explain it and you concentrate, it’ll be easy.’

In this way, my mother was an optimist. She was an optimist through long division, the change over to decimal currency, geometry and the angle of the hypotenuse, introduction to algebra and, finally, logarithms. She was an optimist, but frustrated.

‘For goodness sake, Grace, you’re just not trying!’ she would say in exasperation. She couldn’t understand how I could appear to take in what she was telling me and answer a couple of problems correctly but then show no ability to apply this knowledge to other similar problems. Nor could she believe that I would forget information within half an hour of her giving it to me, so that every maths session seemed completely new and newly difficult.

We struggled on, both hating it and counting the days until I finished school and would never have to open another maths text. When my school Leaving exam results came out, I was amazed to find I had scored a B in maths. I was bracing myself for a fail or, at best, a C. My mother, however, was disappointed, saying, ‘You could have done much better if you’d made up your mind to make the effort.’ I looked at her in astonishment; all these years and she still hadn’t realised – I didn’t understand a single thing. I had just learned how to move rows of incomprehensible numbers and letters from my head into the right spaces on the page. It was like walking through an unknown landscape covered in a thick, suffocating fog. If I stumbled upon my destination, that was pure chance. My mother’s tutorials over the years simply acted like a wayward breeze, shifting the fog just for a moment before it settled back down for life.

Robert and I finally agreed to ‘quarantine’ Ben’s numbers. But instead of limiting him to using them once a day, we did the reverse: he was not allowed to talk about numbers at dinner.

‘Why can’t I talk about numbers at dinner?’ Ben asked yet again.

‘Remember, we talked about it. Not everyone finds numbers as interesting as you do.’

‘Why not?’

I didn’t really know how to answer that one.

‘Let’s talk about our day,’ suggested Robert. ‘What did you two do after kindy this afternoon?’

‘We went to the park, didn’t we, Ben?’ I said.

‘Yes. First we passed number forty-one, then we passed number thirty-nine …’ started Ben.

‘Stop!’ I said, rather loudly, holding up the palm of my hand. ‘No numbers.’

Robert put his hand over his mouth.

‘I know what else happened,’ I added hurriedly, ‘Auntie Liv rang, didn’t she Ben?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ben talked to her for a bit, didn’t you, Ben?’

‘How old is Auntie Liv?’ asked Ben.

‘Ben, you know she’s thirty-nine,’ I replied.

‘Mum is forty-one. Daddy is fifty-five. Auntie Liv is thirty-nine. Granny is …’

‘Ben – enough! No numbers at dinner.’

Ben put on his hurt face. ‘I don’t want any more’.

‘Finish your dinner please.’

‘No, I don’t want to.’

‘You need to eat proper food. Just have four more spoonfuls of rice and then you can get down,’ I said.

‘One, two, three, four,’ he chanted, stuffing them all in his mouth at once and then looking like a cartoon character, cheeks so bunched up he couldn’t chew.

‘That went well,’ said Robert in his dry way. I started to laugh. Ben watched me for a bit and then opened his mouth so that all the rice came spurting out onto the table top. He jumped off his chair and ran into his bedroom shouting, ‘One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.’

Robert peered at the bits of rice in his red wine and drank it. ‘He’s a clever little fellow, isn’t he?’ he said proudly.

Overheard, Ben to his teacher:

‘Actually, you are wrong: today is the sixteenth, not the fifteenth.’

I wanted to understand why Ben was so obsessed with numbers. Our paediatrician said that obsessions like this were just part of the condition of autism and that it was probably a way for Ben to create order and structure in his life. This sounded vague to me, so I did some more of my (obsessive?) reading about autism. Several months and about twenty books later, I decided that the paediatrician had done a fairly good summary of the situation.

‘I wanted to understand why Ben was so obsessed with numbers’

‘I should hope so,’ said Robert. ‘That’s why we pay so much to see him.’

But it seems to me that researchers don’t really know why people with autism fixate on particular obsessions, only that they will have at least one area of obsessive repetition, whether it is flapping their hands, touching the corners of doors, learning all there is to know about trains or insects, memorising phone books or simply running sand through their hands all day. It is partly a retreat to the concrete because it is so difficult for someone with autism to understand other people and abstract ideas. Repetition is also a way of regulating sensory stimulation. Basically, it’s a way of dealing with sensory overload and high anxiety. The repetition helps calm and regulate.

It has also been suggested that people with autism focus on small details because of a failure to be able to see ‘the big picture’, to integrate things and make sense of the world. Their ability to shift attention is also impaired – it’s hard to move on from one thing to the next, hence the desire for sameness.

The most recent theory about autism is that it is an extreme form of the ‘male’ or systematising brain (Baron-Cohen). Our brains are made to understand systems and how physical objects work, but some people have an extreme ability to understand ‘folk physics’. This comes at a cost: their ability to understand people may be limited.

But why numbers? Numbers are a common interest for people with autism. I wanted to know if there is a reason for this.

‘Why do you need a reason?’ asked Robert. ‘Why can’t you accept Ben as he is?’

‘I do accept him. I just want to understand.’

‘What’s to understand, Grace? He likes numbers.’

Overheard, my mother talking to my brother:

‘Today is a very special day for me. Today, Olivia is exactly half my age.’

‘She has been all year, hasn’t she? Or, do you mean half your age to the day?’

‘Of course! It wouldn’t mean anything otherwise.’

Ben’s world, like that of most people with autism, is full of confusion, uncertainty and unpredictability. This is partly because of his difficulty in understanding other people and partly because he experiences every object, every person, every thought as a separate unique event, with no necessary or logical connection to any other event. What is it like to see each tree as an individual as different from another tree as it is from a car, a dog or a man? In a way, it is a vision of total equality. All things are equal; no one, nothing is elevated. All sense of meaning fails because how can we create meaning without metaphor, categories and hierarchies? Without taxonomy we have chaos; just unmediated, inexplicable experience. The world presses upon us. Our own bodies press upon us. There is no sense to be made of sensation. This is Ben’s world – one of experience and perceptions without order, definition or explanation. Could this be anything other than frightening?

‘Ben’s world, like that of most people with autism, is full of confusion, uncertainty and unpredictability’

It is impossibly hard for a non-autistic person to see, hear and feel the world in the way an autistic person might. Even listening to someone with autism is not enough, because the shared language is always our language, the words and concepts and structures of the non-autistic world. Is there a ‘language’ of autism, a language for undifferentiated experience?

How can one survive in such a world? You would have to escape, to shut down. Or you could create a structure to manage it all. For Ben, numbers are true to the etymology of the word integer: ‘whole, entire; marked by moral integrity’ (OED).

Did Ben choose numbers or is it simply that numbers (arithmetic and geometry) form one of the basic underpinning concepts of nature? Spiders spin webs in logarithmic progression. Shells grow in the same proportion. The structure of a snowflake is fractal. Many plants grow according to the Fibonacci series of numbers. Our bodies, our landscape, our architecture, our music are all structured according to mathematical principles. Evidence for the development of the human capacity for counting goes back more than thirty thousand years to signs of tallying on bone and on the walls of upper Palaeolithic caves (Butterworth). In missing the big picture, Ben has perhaps been able to see and appreciate what Szatmari calls ‘the intimate architecture of the world’.

Overheard, Robert talking to Ben:

‘Look, Ben, here is the value of phi – you remember, that’s Greek and it’s the same as the golden mean.’

‘Why is it mean?’

‘No, not mean like horrid. It’s a maths word – the golden ratio. I’ll show you in this book. Look at this. All about Pythagoras.’

Daniel Tammet is a young man with Asperger’s Syndrome who is also a savant with extraordinary mathematical and linguistic skills. He has written a book about his life and says this about numbers:

There are moments, as I’m falling into sleep at night, that my mind fills suddenly with bright light and all I can see are numbers – hundreds, thousands of them – swimming rapidly over my eyes. The experience is beautiful and soothing to me. Some nights, when I’m having difficulty falling asleep, I imagine myself walking around my numerical landscapes. Then I feel safe and happy. I never feel lost, because the prime number shapes act as signposts.

I love this passage because it gives me some sense of how Ben might feel about numbers. Since Tammet has synaesthesia (a neurological condition in which the senses are mixed), his vision of numbers is extremely unusual, much more colourful and textured than most people’s. But perhaps Ben also has reassuring visions of numbers. When I asked him if he sees numbers inside his head, he went to stand in front of the mirror and said, ‘Where are they? I can’t see them.’

Ben’s latest interest is prime numbers. He understands that prime numbers are not divisible by any numbers other than one and themselves and that they occur irregularly. He will often interrupt an activity with a comment or question to me such as, ‘Mum, is eight hundred and sixty-three a prime number?’ or ‘Mum, that house is one hundred and seventy-nine; it’s a prime number’.

He has also made up his own series of numbers, which he has named ‘sweb’ numbers. I have yet to discover the clue to this series; they appear to be random and varying. Is it a random series of numbers that Ben believes have some continuity, or just a list of numbers that he likes? Or is it a random series that he knows to be random and is just using for interest (or as a joke)? Last week, when I went to collect Ben from Megan’s house, I found her husband sitting at his computer.

‘Ah, Grace,’ he said. ‘You can tell us how to spell sweb. Is it German or something?’

‘Um … did you ask Ben?’

‘He won’t say. But I’m trying to find out about these sweb numbers and there doesn’t seem to be anything on the Net. If you look up Fibonacci or the primes, there are heaps of sites.’

It was only at this point that I realised that he wondered if sweb numbers were a genuine mathematical curiosity, not just some game of Ben’s. That night I told my mother the story of how Megan and her husband were kind enough to look on the Net for sweb numbers.

‘Sweb numbers,’ she said, a little hesitantly. ‘Should I know about those?’

‘Of course not. Ben just made them up. That’s the point.’

‘Oh, I see.’ But I could tell she didn’t see.

‘Am I the only person who finds this funny?’ I asked Robert, somewhat rhetorically. ‘What’s the matter with my family – can’t they see it’s a bit odd to take a seven-year-old’s word on maths?’

Robert just smiled his tolerant-with-Grace smile.

I wake to the sounds of objects being moved around in Ben’s room: the dragging of his rug across the wooden floor, the soft crush of a beanbag hitting something hard, and then a loud crash, as if a box of toys has tipped over.

‘Ben, what are you doing?’ I call out, not wanting to get up yet. He comes into my room, a worried look on his face.

‘Are you cross?’

‘No, darling. I just want to know what you’re up to.’

‘I’m making space in my room.’

‘Oh. For what?’

‘I’m going to have a thousand things in my room. I need more space.’

‘One thousand!’ I sit up in bed and put on my glasses.

‘Am I allowed to?’ he asks anxiously.

‘Yes, I guess so.’ I’m a bit hesitant. ‘But isn’t a thousand an awful lot of things? I mean, is there space? Do we have a thousand things? Could you even keep count?’

His face clears. ‘It’s okay,’ he says happily, ‘I’m going to have ten rows of one hundred things. That will make a thousand, won’t it?’ And off he goes, back to his arrangements.

Two hours later, when we have to leave for school, Ben has finished his first row of one hundred objects, consisting of thirty-two marbles, fifteen Thomas the Tank engines, twenty-two coloured pencils, a stack of CDs (eighteen), a packet of tea bags (ten) and three odd socks.

‘Goodness me!’ I say. ‘What a lot of work you’ve done.’

‘But I’ve only done one row,’ says Ben. ‘Do we really have to go now?’

‘Yes, we really have to go now. You can come back to this after school. If you still want to, that is. You might decide that a hundred is enough after all.’

‘I might,’ says Ben. ‘But I might still want to reach one thousand!’

Works Cited

American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSM IV, Fourth Edition, APA, 1994.

Baron-Cohen, Simon, The Essential Difference: Men, Women and the Extreme Male Brain, Penguin Books, 2004.

Baron-Cohen, Simon, et al., ‘Autism occurs more often in families of physicists, engineers and mathe-maticians’, Autism, 2, 1998, pp 296–301.

Butterworth, Brian, What Counts: How Every Brain is Hardwired for Math, Simon & Schuster, 1999.

Oxford Dictionary of English, OUP, 2005.

Seigel, Bryna, The World of the Autistic Child, OUP, 1996.

Szatmari, Peter, A Mind Apart: Understanding Children with Autism and Asperger Syndrome, Guildford Press, 2004.

Tammet, Daniel, Born on a Blue Day: A Memoir of Asperger’s and an Extraordinary Mind, Hodder & Stoughton, 2006.

People’s names have been changed in this essay to protect their privacy. This essay was later revised and became a chapter in Rachel Robertson's book of the same name, Reaching One Thousand: A Story of Love, Motherhood and Autism, published by Black Inc. in 2012.

During a lull in the fiercest weather event the south-east of the continent has seen in thirty years – we call them ‘events’ these days, as though someone’s putting them on – I went out on a Sunday morning and bought myself a book.

I should tell you that we live on an acre in the country one hundred and twenty-five kilometres south-west of the city. We moved here two months ago after another unsuccessful attempt to love – and afford – the city. We used to live in the mountains. Then children came, and I needed to find the kind of regular work that feeds a mortgage and a family, and which one finds more of in a city. We moved to a terrace house in the inner city and tried to like it. But I’m not much good at the kind of work you have to do to afford the kind of oversubscribed and overlit life the city wants you to lead, and every day in town was another day I couldn’t see out to any kind of country, and every day I seemed to become less like the man I thought I was.

So here – to keep it trim – we are in the landscape again. The house we found was built for the man who ran the dairy for the big property from which our acre has since been cut. The house has grown in the hundred years since it was that first dairyman’s home. It has four bedrooms now, its weatherboards are a nice dusty yellow, and its roof is clad in corrugated iron. It is a plain house, but pretty, and it is set about with rose bushes and mature trees, and it is more than enough for us.

But the real reason we bought the place – apart from the paddocks over the fence and the space around us and the cool air above, and apart from the fact we could afford it – sits down the back between the silver poplars and the oak. We moved here because of a cowshed. The cowshed is a little older than the house, and it is the reason the house is here. It is made of brick, rendered now and painted the same kind of yellow as the house. According to Ross, who came the other day to dig a trench to bring the telephone wire down from the house, the cowshed is a four-stand walk-through, and it would have milked sixty head twice a day one hundred years ago. Since mid-March it is where I have sat and worked, and I am sitting there now – writing this – in early June. Across the lane the elms have stopped being yellow and stand bare against an acid-clear winter blue sky. The ground smells of poplar leaves and the aftermath of rain. The light is failing; soon I must go and lock the hens in their coop. Down in the paddocks some heifers bawl. Soon the frogs will start up along the Wingecarribee, which snakes through the pastures and the willows and the birches down there, a quarter mile from where I sit.

I am in Australia, though it’s not easy to tell. No eucalypts here. No sheoaks in sight. Nothing to place me here except for the name of that river and the way a mob of Eastern Greys bounds away in its desultory panicwhenever you get close to them in the paddock by the river, and the fact that it is winter in June, and the way right now the possum drags its world-weary self into the nest it calls its own in the ceiling above my head. Something antipodean – which has nothing to do with ‘Australia,’ that abstraction, of course, but everything to do with the way this place belongs to the natural history of this bend of this particular river on this particular continent under this bit of heaven in the present geological era, the Holocene, doomed and beautiful era of men – something antipodean, more than a scent, less than a voice, something close to a sensibility, is immanent here, in the face of so much circumstantial evidence that this cowshed is set down somewhere in West Massachusetts or The Cotswolds. And I don’t believe for a minute that I would write the truth about this place, nor would I write truly from this place about anything, if I didn’t catch in my syntax and diction something of the cadence of that local Wingecarribeean intelligence, including the way it plays among these colonial cows and cowsheds, these immigrant trees and grasses and women and children and men, such as me, sitting here in my post-pastoral shed withmy pale skin, my Cornish surname and my Apple computer.

Australia, the driest continent on earth after Antarctica, is drying out. Down in the southern half of the island, we’re nearly ten years into a drought that’s starting to feel like the future, global warming being what it is turning out to be. The dam, for instance, that keeps Sydney in water, is below thirty-five per cent, and it’s not been above fifty for as long as I can remember. In the place where I have come to live, a panicked government has slyly approved the pumping of the Kangaloon Aquifer into the river system that stocks that dam – a plan that threatens to wreck the pastures and swamps and brown-barrel forests of the basalt hills under which the aquifer runs. Such is our growing desperation. For the skies have dried up, and the ground below is perishing. In five years we will have a desalination plant turning the Pacific Ocean into potable water. But we’ll be needing quieter and more radical solutions than that: like, for instance, the sclerophyll habits of the native trees – their ethic of restraint.

‘Australia, the driest continent on earth after Antarctica, is drying out’

But in the meantime, we have been dancing and voting and praying for rain – and we’ve been doing it too well, it seems. For suddenly, on the very afternoon of the eve of last weekend, a long weekend, a low-pressure cell settled over a large tract of the east coast and dropped 200-odd millilitres out of cyclonic winds over the next two days. Trees fell, houses fell, roads fissured, and cars upon them and families within them were washed away. Farming land and shopping malls and entire suburban streets were inundated.

Things were pretty calm, by comparison, here along the Wingecarribee. I went out Saturday night and strung a tarp over the chicken coop, because I hadn’t got around to getting someone to get around to patching the leaky roof, and the girls were having trouble staying dry. I was wetter than they’ll ever get by the time I had fought the blue tarp placid in the gusting winds and pinned it with bricks to the roof. And my cowshed leaked; the winds were carrying rain from all points, including, apparently, north, and some of it got in under the big barn door. I came in Saturday morning and found a shallow kind of estuary making a muddy kind of sea of the rug on the concrete floor. I mopped it up and plugged the gap with an old towel and got a fire started in the stove and thanked the household gods that the good old structure, home now to my library as well as my work, was as sound as it looked, and I got on.

By Sunday the worst was over – though not in the Hunter, where floods were just making ready to come downstream. The system that had caused all this had blown out to sea to make its peace. But a trough was coming in behind it, so I figured we had a few good hours to take our cloistered selves and our cabin-feverish children outside. The paddock is normally where I would have started. The paddock and the river. To check on the ducks and the white-faced herons, the horses and the roos. ‘Can you take me to the paddock?’ Henry, who is four, asks whenever I return to the house from the shed. This morning he was more eager than ever because he could see from the house some impressive puddles down there in need of being splashed. But right there – that was going to be the problem with the paddock, even in good rainboots. So instead, we took a drive to Berrima, and after horsing round at the village shops while Maree discovered bargains, we drove some more and landed up at Berkelouw Book Barn.

Now, I don’t need any more books. But you don’t have to need them. I found some nice old Zane Greys and a Paul Auster and a Larry McMurtry, but I left them. I found two volumes by a good poet who used to live close by, one of them named – aptly – Berrima Winter, and I bought them. And then, after an hour’s bibliophilic shambling about the wooden floors, face out on the counter of the café, where we had bought off the boys with a milkshake, there it was, the thing I didn’t know until then I had been looking for: The Book of Tea.

The book was a small work of art, humble and finely made and useful like a piece of anagama pottery: a small hardback, bound in white cloth, the title gold embossed on a black panel, and textured brown endpapers inside. This was an object incarnating an idea, and the idea, happily, was what the book was about. The Book of Tea is a Zen classic, written a hundred years ago by Okakura Kakuzo. What Okakura, like Basho well before him, wanted us to know was that the tea ceremony, performed, of course, mindfully, might be not just a metaphor but an actual practice – right up there with painting and poetry and solitude – for mindful living; for a well-made, dignified and responsible kind of life, and for what Okakura called a beautiful death.

What he meant by that was not so much an actual (good) death but a kind of dying to one’s meaner self – a making of one’s life, as Sam Hamill glosses it in the introduction – part of a greater work of art. And that greater work of art is the way that nature goes. ‘The first task for each artist,’ Basho wrote in Knapsack Notebook, meaning not just the making of art but the making of a good, true and beautiful life, ‘is to overcome the barbarian or animal heart and mind, to become one with nature’.

Mark Tredinnick in the cowshed (photograph by Tony Sernack)

 

And so one might live well and, for that matter, write and paint and parent and garden and keep the chooks dry and mop up the cowshed well by adopting ‘tea mind’, by living as though one were making and sharing a good cup of tea, a thing one has learned to make so well – sticking at the task and bringing all one’s attention to it – that the enactment becomes easy and natural. As though it belonged to nature herself. ‘Learn the rules,’ Basho advised artists, poets especially, ‘and forget the rules.’

‘Tea mind’, if I have understood it, describes pretty well how I aspire to live here and how I would like to write and how I would like quietly to change the world’s mind. And I am pretty sure I’m going to fail, though the failing and carrying on anyway is part of the ethic The Book of Tea describes. Which goes something like this: to live conformably with the rest of creation; to live modestly, mercifully, truly; to say nothing, if one can’t say something that helps; to do nothing, if one can’t do something that helps. And there is an aesthetic that goes with it: the simple vernacular beauty of the little white book and the tea ceremony it describes; of the cowshed and the paddocks in winter. I was always attracted to the idea of living mindful of one’s small part in the larger natural world. In the story of one’s habitat. In the narrative of evolution. In the geologic epic of the world. I like the idea, though I always stumble at the practice, of living as if I really were a part, like the wrens in the hedge right now, of the place in time, attuned, as Basho put it, to ‘nature through out the four seasons’ (not that there are four seasons here).

‘I was always attracted to the idea of living mindful of one’s small part in the larger natural world’

The secret to the beautiful life, then, is tea; the secret is attunement to a larger world than one’s self; the secret is perspective; the secret is humble, open-eyed, big-hearted, tough-minded awareness.

I paid for the milkshake and coffees, and I bought the book, and as we drove home into the returning rain, I began to wonder how tea mind might look in weather like we had just had, in weather not yet done. What would the tea-mind practitioner look like, for instance, having drunk their tea and walked down to a cowshed, sending some e-mails as the storm resumes outside, and writing some poems and later, perhaps, doing something about trying to persuade the government to stop drawing so mercilessly on the Kangaloon Aquifer just over the ridge – what would one look like if one’s actions were attuned to a once-in-thirty-year weather event like this? What would tea mind look like in cyclonic mood? What would Hurricane Katrina mind look like, for that matter, and what good would it bring?

Nature never was temperate, and she is not getting any calmer. A life pursued at one with nature would not be the tranquil endeavour The Book of Tea might make one imagine. Would a beautiful life and death include behaving now and then like a turbulent low-pressure cell, like the waves that washed a tanker onto Nobby’s Beach and forced thousands of Novacastrians out of their homes and washed nine people away in their cars and killed them?

Okakura has an answer:

Those of us who know not the secret of properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles we call life are constantly in a state of misery while vainly trying to appear happy and contented. We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the roll of the billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit, or, like Liethse, ride upon the hurricane itself?

I am pretty sure that Okakura’s idea would bring small comfort to the extended family of a mother and father and three young children whose car fell into a fissure opened in the Old Pacific Highway last Friday in the thick of all this by the falling rain and the rising creek and carried downstream to their deaths. Nature, whether you are at one with her or not, is blind, like justice. Riding the hurricane can kill you, and the dying won’t always be beautiful. There is a quietism in tea mind – there is a kind of resignation implicit in the very ethic I aspire to – that troubles me. But as in nature, so in human life – and so Ecclesiastes, that other great book, says – there are storms and there is death; there is violence and there is peace; ‘there is a time for every purpose under heaven’; there is a time, for instance, to weep, and a time, a bit later, to laugh; there is ‘a time to break down and a time to build up’.

So I can see how tea mind – place mind, if I may translate Okakura loosely, even cowshed mind – might include rage and protest, rightly steeped, of course, and poured precisely for whom and only for whom it was meant. When marching on the Capitol, I hear Okakura intone, just march on the Capitol; when writing nature poems, just write nature poems; when changing the baby, just change the baby; when changing the world, just change the world. Master the steps required for that one task, and perform them in good time, as though they were the most natural thing in the world – and the only thing on your mind right now.

The weather event played right through the weekend – it still plays – in newspapers and on television as a story of calamity: holidays ruined, property damaged, hopes dashed, lives, worst of all, lost. Disaster is one way, perfectly understandable, to characterise the weather. And again, it is all very well for me, high and dry in my cowshed in the placid Southern Highlands, to say this, but to tell the weather that way is to see the world from an alienated, merely human perspective; it is not to see things whole; it is not to observe the world with tea mind. Ours is, after all, a continent in drought; the land – and we upon it – need the rain. And we need it to come as emphatically as this; the groundwaters are drying out, and only such heavy rain, again and again, will bring them back, if they are ever coming back. We should be giving thanks, while we also help and comfort those who have suffered.

The world, we must not forget, has changed. It was always thus, of course. That is the nature of the world. But lately it’s been doing it fast, and it looks like we are largely to blame. Where I live, the world has got drier; and in many places it is getting sporadically stormier. Like this weekend. This is nature now. This is a new kind of season, and we had better get used to it. There is going to be more hurricane-riding before we are through. ‘The art of life lies in a constant readjustment to our surroundings,’ Okakura advises. So let’s adjust; let’s see the fierce new world for what she is; let’s ride her and rein her in how we can.

‘Let’s adjust; let’s see the fierce new world for what she is; let’s ride her and rein her in how we can’

When I interviewed David Suzuki last year, he told me that the world has, in his estimation, ten years to change its habits fundamentally – to the tune of ninety per cent, which is to say, almost completely. We’re going to have to scale things back. Drinking tea will not be enough; but it does speak of moderation, a thing we are going to have to master again. The modesty and simplicity of the ceremony remain a powerful metaphor in these immoderate and apocalyptic times. We need to use less of everything, Suzuki explained to me with alarming equanimity (‘tea mind’?) and assurance – less energy and water, in particular, in everything we do (writing books, warming houses, travelling, lighting our lives, growing grain, raising cattle, raising children, fashioning clothes, shipping everything, you name it) if we are to avoid tipping the earth into the kind of unstoppable atrophic chaos Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, so vividly depicted. And we need to do it fast and stay calm while we do.

The good news is we have the techniques and the wherewithal, Suzuki and others say, to change our ways to that degree in just about every field. The bad news is what it always was: everywhere in the developed and developing world there is an overwhelming lack of political, mercantile and domestic will. Prosperity is a drug of addiction; denial and lethargy are two of its side effects. So perhaps the best news of all is also the worst: we are running out of oil. Nothing may teach us to live more slowly than running out of gas. And when the oil is gone – and later the coal – we will, if it is not too late, stop fueling the engine that is overheating the system.

The Book of Tea speaks of the ultimate virtue of attunement, of living at one with the way things go. Harmony is the organising metaphor here. The phrase ‘at onement,’ which grew out of a Middle English expression, used to mean the same thing – harmony. ‘Atonement’, though, which that phrase evolved into, means not just harmony but a process of reconciliation, some kind of putting things right again, and – importantly – some kind of sacrifice or suffering. If we want to live sustainably, if we want the world to keep us, and more particularly our children, we are going to have to surrender some of what we have; we are going to have to give something away. It is going to cost us, and so it should: it is worth the world. Someone has to suffer, and it might as well be us.

We need, more than anything, to learn the elegant restraint, the modesty, of the tea ceremony – a thing the eucalypts already know. And we are going to need to persist. Ritual repetition of modest gestures is what the tea cere-mony, like all Zen practice, consists in; it is what it teaches; it is what the world needs now, possibly more than love. Unless that is what love really is.

The tea ceremony – ‘teaism’, as Okakura calls it – ‘is a worship of the imperfect.’ To live well is to essay something within your gift and to work at it until you have got it more or less down. Perfection, in other words, is not necessary, even in these urgent times. We are going to fail the world long before the world fails us; it is a question of how badly or beautifully. What is compulsory is effort: sacrifice and discipline and selflessness.

One cold night this week, after the stories, some of them recited by the boy, some of them read by his mother, Maree was talking Henry to sleep, and she was talking, as mothers sometimes will, about how the boy had come into the world and how it had made her glad. Nearly asleep, the boy asked her, ‘What is the world?’ What, indeed.

‘What is the world?’ is the question we may be here to live. Learn the world, Basho might almost have said, and forget the world. That is to say, become not merely yourself; become, where you are, what the world is. Celebrate the world; it is beautiful and terrible. Like God; like one-self. Come into the world over and over again.

And because the world, in its physical manifestation, is also what we drink and breathe and eat and walk and work upon, we had better not just observe it; we had better husband and conserve it. And try to rein ourselves in.

After the rain, we had four hard frosts; four cold and brilliant days. Now it is raining again. Steadily this time. Good rain; nothing violent. By mid-month this is already the wettest June since 1964; 350 millilitres of rain have fallen, and this is only the start of what we need. The Wingecarribee has broken its banks and made a floodplain of the pastures just below me. But still there is hardly a word of welcome for the rain. Nothing much is said in the press or on the streets of the virtues of this drenching (except at last today a mention at the bottom of the nightly news that our dam may soon be up to close to fifty per cent capacity.) We seem to need all our stories to speak of ourselves. We want drought and flood; we want tragedy and loss; we want heartbreak and fairy tale and comfort. The land is the big picture, and we forget to paint it. It isn’t news, of course; we are, as ever, the news.

So the rain runs in the papers as the quantum of damage, as contested insurance claims, as heroics and adversity, and it is all those things, and, had I lost my family or farm or library, my teacup might be stormier. But mostly the rain is itself; that is the story, and it would behove us to listen. I have been hearing it all day on the roof and in the gutters; I’ve been seeing it in the hanging lichens of the poplars. The trench Ross dug across the yard has subsided. The boys step in it, and Henry gets stuck there, right up to his knees. The world has got hold of him.

At dusk I wade out to the car and drive – there I go driving again – with our baby girl to the post office to send a birthday card to a nephew before it’s too late. Lucy falls asleep in the car on the road; that was part of the plan. I am home now, and I have carried her to her cot, and I hope she’s sleeping still, but I have come back here to write on, and it rains on, and Maree’s in the house feeding the boys, and night is falling along the Wingecarribee. My wife knows a whole lot more than I ever will about the art of tea and the business of patience and the repetitive performance of small, good, necessary tasks. But something in me wants to write today. So here I sit again at small, difficult repetitive gestures of my own, in which I persist in a cowshed, noting ‘the beautiful foolishness of things’, in case it helps. And beside me rests The Book of Tea.

When I came upon The Book of Tea, I was wrestling with a poem. I didn’t know – I still don’t – if it is an especially good poem. But I knew I had to write it, and I had been sitting at it in the shed, picking it up and putting it down between other obligations all week, in every kind of weather, most of it cold. That Sunday morning in the bookbarn, I knew my poem was two stanzas short. A poem is an equation, among other things, and mine hadn’t quite come out. I was aware, too, that my poem was still looking for whatever it is that tautens a poem, that tightens its screws – a line of thought older and more beautiful than I had discovered working alone in a cowshed; it wanted, perhaps, a hit of caffeine; the medicinal fragrance of a cup of hot black tea. And when I opened the tea book, it happened.

‘I found in the book what my poem had been trying to help me think – about the way I want to live and work, here by the Wingecarribee, or wherever, until I am done; I found what I had been trying to say’

I found in the book what my poem had been trying to help me think – about the way I want to live and work, here by the Wingecarribee, or wherever, until I am done; I found what I had been trying to say. It wasn’t the only answer in the only words I will ever need to the best question I’ll ever ask; half the books in my library know the same thing the tea book told me. Some of the books of my grandfather’s preaching Bible lying over there on the third shelf up have been talking to me thus all along. But it was a good answer, shapely and wise. And timely. And not only for my poem.

I found in The Book of Tea an economics and a moral geometry – to use Okakura’s phrasing – for the slow and mindful, engaged and grounded life I aspire to here, and at which, as I say, I will almost certainly fail. The tea ceremony, writes Okakura, ‘is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life’. Maybe that is what I am down here working at tonight, my feet cold in their boots, the rain falling hard again on the roof.

‘I wanted to give a sense of the people of the book, the different hands that had made it, used it, protected it. I wanted it to be a gripping narrative, even suspenseful.’ So says Hanna Heath, protagonist of Geraldine Brooks’s latest novel, about her search through time and place for the history of ‘the Sarajevo Haggadah’, the ‘Book’ of the title. She is accustomed to writing scholarly essays that derive from her function as a rare books conservator, full of ‘riveting stuff like how many quires there are and how many leaves per quire… and so on’. She wants this one to be different.

Hanna’s search for the exact provenance of the Haggadah takes her from her home in Sydney, in 1996, to war-ravaged Sarajevo, and thence, having sighted the manuscript, which is ‘small … convenient for use at the Passover dinner table’, to Vienna to see her old mentor Werner Heinrich. She then travels to Boston where, by chance, her mother is also lecturing; then to London, back to Sarajevo; to Sydney via Arnhem Land; and then back to Sarajevo again. The peripatetic requirements of her esoteric profession are tracked through alternating chapters of the novel, which eventually bring her up to 2002.

While Hanna is engaged in travelling halfway round the world in pursuit of her intellectual goals, the alternate chapters chronicle the history of the precious book in reverse chronology. An expert in ancient manuscripts, Serif, and other Jews, including Lola who has lost all her family to the Nazis, join the partisans during World War II, having contrived to save ‘one of the museum’s greatest treasures’, the Haggadah. In successively interleaved chapters, the book’s ownership is traced to Vienna, rife with anti-Semitism in 1894; then to Venice, 1609, where a wealthy Jewess passes the book to a rabbi with a dangerous gambling compulsion and an uneasy friendship with a Catholic priest; to Tarragena, Spain, 1492, when a Jewish diaspora begins; and to Seville, 1480, where Muslim, Catholic and Jewish imprints make themselves felt on the book’s biography. As Hanna comments on this reverse history, we are invited to see the Haggadah at times when it ‘was still just some family’s book, a thing to be used, before it became an exhibit’.

In Lisa Gorton’s first collection of poetry, somewhat ambiguously entitled Press Release, light, absence and doubt are major preoccupations. The poems speak of ‘a weight of light’, ‘neon expectation’, ‘ruined cities overrun with light’ and ‘all that falling light’ – in just the first of this volume’s four sections. Light, for Gorton, is a sometimes mesmerising and often overwhelming force. Among other things, it is the illumination of nostalgia, the halo of memory and the shining-out of presence. Interestingly, it is also about culmination, often standing for various forms of – usually problematic – realisation and achievement. For example, in ‘Scald’, the poem’s persona speaks of ‘light drawn in to the idea of light, all-eye and all / forgetting, more entire than perfection’; and in ‘Guns I / Major Mitchell, 1836:’ wild birds ‘are tearing the blueblack / shadows out of the river’, as if light and life are joined in defying the ruination of death and the depredations of time. But in Gorton’s poetry light never fully escapes the dark, and in ‘Scald’ the ‘sheer of light’ is also a ‘shining blank’, while the poem’s speaker represents herself as a ‘bright / dark torso’, images in which absence, darkness and light are inextricably connected.

This is the latest volume of a reference work which should sit on the shelves of every municipal library. It assesses the lives of people, mostly prominent, who died in the years 1981–90. It lists them in alphabetical order; a further volume will be needed to embrace the 600 or 700 people whose surnames began with the letters L to Z.

‘More difficult to do a thing than to talk scintillating dialogue of 1890, ‘The Critic as Artist’. To hold to such a belief, Gilbert declares, is ‘a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.’

Since the November federal election, kicking John Howard while he’s down has become something of a national pastime. While Howard’s take no-prisoners-except-on-Nauru behaviour has now exposed him to gleeful mass taunting, the idea that the end of his resilient political career has instantly created a noble Australia, its citizens and institutions cleansed and renew ed, is wishful thinking. In this context, Judith Brett’s new Quarterly Essay injects some welcome clear-headedness. Brett rains blows on Howard, but she is not a Howard-hater in the counterproductive and grandiose style of, say, Phillip Adams. Instead, she takes aim at the former prime minister in a characteristically nuanced and astute way. She bridges a gap – too often in Australia, a gulf – between scholars and interested laypeople, offering prose that is accessible and lively but that avoids dumbing down complex issues.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

Shakespeare the Thinker is the final and posthumously published book of the Oxford critic A.D. Nuttall, who died unexpectedly in January 2007. Pitched at a wider readership than most of his earlier writings, the book is the culmination of Nuttall’s lifetime thinking about Shakespeare, and the work by which his remarkable originality as a critic will no doubt be most widely recognised.

The cover design for this book features a painting by Indigenous artist Johnny Bulun Bulun. It is an appropriate choice, given that it was this artist who in 1988 spearheaded the first major action in an Australian court against the unauthorised reproduction of Aboriginal works for commercial purposes, and in so doing set a precedent in establishing the existence of copyright in Aboriginal art. The case concerned the use of works of art on T-shirts. It was followed by one against the Reserve Bank of Australia, which had reproduced an Aboriginal image on the bicentennial $10 note without permission, and the famous ‘carpets case’ against a company that imported carpets made in Vietnam that contained some well-known Aboriginal artworks in their design.

When G.B. Barton presented his two works concerning the literary history of New South Wales to the Paris Exhibition of 1866, he hoped that they would enable readers ‘to form an exact idea of the progress, extent and prospects of literary enterprise among us’. The words are succinct, unobjectionable, and their sentiments influenced much of the literary history of the next century, much as the productions of that time were usually annals rather than analysis. Barton’s civic-minded project linked the maturing of Australian literature with its political culture. Implicit in his endeavour, though numerous others would use the metaphor outright, was the notion of ‘coming-of-age’. This chimera had as long a life as the search for the Great Australian Novel.

‘I am really only an oppositionist, distrustful of power wherever I see it,’ wrote Jack Barry (1903–69) in 1951; and perhaps his oppositional instincts held him back from the heights of power to which he sometimes aspired. Instead, this biography argues, his impact was that of ‘a public intellectual before the term was invented’.

Under the umbrella of the State Library of New South Wales, the Mitchell Library in Sydney is one of Australia’s great cultural and collecting institutions. Opened to researchers in March 1910, the Mitchell Library was founded on the ‘peerless collection’ of books, manuscripts, maps, and pictures relating to Australia and the Pacific bequeathed to the then Public Library of New South Wales by the reclusive and wealthy Sydney book collector David Scott Mitchell (1835–1907). The bequest brought with it a generous endowment of ₤70,000 to fund additions to the collection. Since then, a veritable Everest of Australian research and scholarship has been built on the foundation of the Mitchell collection – the materials that  Mitchell himself had acquired and those added subsequently by several dedicated and ambitious generations of library custodians. In the ninety-eight years since the Mitchell Library opened its doors to the public, Mitchell’s original collection of 40,000 volumes – amazingly rich in its day – now stands at 590,000. Great acquisitions, many of them formidably expensive, continue to be made and to be hailed in both the Sydney press and in national news. It is right that a sense of local and national pride continues to be felt in the achievements of this singular Australian library.

Readers of this review will likely know of this book as a result of the howls of outrage reported in the media at the beginning of December concerning Max Hastings’s claims about Australian performance in the fighting in 1945. It is not fair to judge a long and complex book on the basis of a single, ten-page chapter, but since that is the section of the book that has attracted attention in this part of the world, it seems best to deal with it first before moving on to the rest of Hastings’s lengthy and detailed account of the final year of the war against Japan.

If we keep hearing about our famous expatriates, the Greers and Jameses and Hugheses and the like, it is because they have made it their business to ensure we do. Gone but not forgotten. Others such as Randolph Stow or Alan Seymour were less busy at self-promotion. But Ray Mathew was a mere rumour. You saw his books here and there in the antiquarian bookshops, especially the short stories, A Bohemian Affair (1961), and the joint collection with Mena Abdullah, Time of the Peacock (1965). Some of his plays were eventually gathered into representative collections. Mathew himself seemed to disappear into thin air. Tom Shapcott’s project is to retrieve a writer he believes we should have paid more heed to.

joanne burns: There’s a name to conjure with. The familiar lowercase signature – first encountered in my now-tattered copies of 1970s women’s poetry magazines such as Khasmik and Cauldron, and in the anthologies Mother, I’m Rooted (1975) and No Regrets (1979) – now appears on burns’s fourteenth book. An Illustrated History of Dairies offers a generous selection of her verse and prose poems, including the satires on (sub)urban life for which she is well known, condensed narrative pieces, enigmatic fragments linked by flashes of surrealist wit.

Like all of her books, this one offers fresh directions and perceptions. Ever since I heard joanne burns read at a conference in Sydney in 2004 and realised what brilliant performance scripts these poems are, I find I listen to them more attentively as I read, almost hearing the mobile intelligence at work. There are her characteristic dramatic monologues, like ‘pluck’, in the voice of a robot, which begins by alluding to its precedent in Robert Browning (‘that’s my last master hanging on the wall’):

Seriatim, the poems are in order, though not subdivided into marked divisions indicating common themes with some compelling logic to them, but a series of observations, dot points, which may or may not be part of a larger argument. It is like a conversation. No one knows exactly where it will end when it starts, but it goes on with an order, sometimes determined by logic, otherwise by association, free and not so free. The book is one long poem; the poet’s consciousness explores ageing, place, time, poetry itself, language, and emotion, taking on whatever life throws up. So we start with reflections on Australian history, very old age (parents), old age (the poet himself), poetry and its practice, places here and abroad, and finally Islam and its extremists. It is a conversation between poet and reader in which there is no lofty conclusion, no stunning revelation or gesture, but a sharing of thought and emotion, which ends with the threads to be picked up later.

The day I began writing this review, the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA) news service carried three items reflecting the umbilical nature of ties between the United States and Israel. One item reported President George W. Bush as threatening to veto an intelligence bill because it would require revelations about a mysterious Israeli air attack on Syria on September 6. A second reported the Bush administration’s delaying a request to Congress for approval of an arms sale to Saudi Arabia. The sale forms part of a $20 billion deal with Arab nations, aimed at a united front against Iran, but ‘some pro-Israeli groups and Congress members say it is risky to sell offensive arms to a régime that has at times harboured militant Islamists’. The third item dealt with a bill to fully integrate the United States and Israeli missile defence systems. The bill’s congressional sponsor hailed it as ‘a symbol of our shared values and a safer 21^st century’.

Vietnam: The Australian war
                                HarperCollins, $55 hb, 832 pp 

More than thirty years after the last helicopters left the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, the flow of new books on the Vietnam war shows no sign of abating. Among them are some intended for a limited, scholarly market, some for a wider general readership; some for Americans, some for Australians. These three books exemplify some of the trends in both the substance and the style of Vietnam war histories, and illustrate both the virtues and the faults of differing approaches to the most controversial conflict of the twentieth century.

It is not hard to see what the Australian public wants. Stand by the checkout counter of a major bookstore, especially around Anzac Day or during the pre-Christmas rush, and watch the unstoppable advance of thick, square books on Australian military history from the prominent display cases towards Australian living rooms. They usually have evocative, one-word titles like Gallipoli or Kokoda or Tobruk, sometimes with a subtitle that explains that the subject is really the Australian soldier in this or that battle or campaign. Their authors are freelance writers rather than academics, generally with a background in journalism. The outstanding example of the genre is Les Carlyon’s The Great War (2006), co-winner of the inaugural Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History, but other notable names in the field include Peter FitzSimons, Roland Perry, Paul Ham, and Patrick Lindsay.

To refer to these writers generically as ‘journalists’ is not to deprecate them but simply to contrast them with ‘the professionals’, the military historians in universities and research centres. In military and other forms of history, Australia owes much to a fine tradition of serious journalists, from Charles Bean through Gavin Long and Gavin Souter to Paul Kelly, who have written important and substantial history books.

Historian John Nicholson has never written about war or sport – two of the pillars of Australian identity – yet he remains our leading writer of history for young people. I reviewed Songlines and Stone Axes (ABR, April 2007), the first book in a five-volume series of trade, transport, and travel within Australia. The book won the Young People’s History Prize in the 2007 New South Wales Premier’s History Awards, recognition that should ensure a wider audience. Songlines and Stone Axes revealed the extensive symbolic and material exchange within and between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, blending patient research of scholarly journals with a firm sense of what will catch a younger reader’s interest and imagination. The book requires readers to re-examine their understanding of Australia’s first people, and reflect again on the country that Europeans entered.

Calling for a revolution in higher education

Dear Editor,

In his victory speech on 24 November 2007, Kevin Rudd reaffirmed education as a key priority for the future of this country. We believe that a true education revolution must include a new wave of higher education reform - reform that will redress the imbalances that have characterised the sector of the last decade or more. Such reform should redirect resources back into the core university activities of teaching and research. We urge immediate attention and commitment to the following:

• slim down and simplify the requirements of the higher education bureaucracy, and thus reduce university administrative costs
• provide world-class university education for our future generations through full government funding for the sector’s teaching-related expenditures, including education at the honours and postgraduate levels
• reduce universities’ dependence on overseas full-fee students, a practice that has led to the emergence of cash-crop education programmes which have damaged Australia’s reputation in education
• repeal the previous government’s VSU legislations, to ensure an active and full student experience
• revive Australia’s faltering international standard in innovative research by increasing funding for competitive research projects in all areas

Two Essayists Share $10,000 Prize

This year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay has been won by Rachel Robertson and Mark Tredinnick. This is the first time that the Calibre Prize – a joint initiative of ABR and of the Copyright Agency Limited – has been shared (last year’s winner, in the inaugural year, was Elisabeth Holdsworth).

One hundred and twenty-seven essayists entered the competition, an increase on last year. The judges on this occasion were Kerryn Goldsworthy (a former Editor of ABR), Paul Hetherington (Director, Publications and Events, National Library of Australia) and Peter Rose (Editor of ABR). Their choice was not an easy one. Eighteen essays were long-listed, across a range of essayistic genres, from the personal, the speculative and the journalistic to the political and the historical. More so than last year, ecological and environmental themes were prominent, as if a decisive review of priorities and menaces is under way in the popular imagination.

In this fascinating and irritating book, Elizabeth Farrelly hits out at almost everything about the modern world. She is an architect, and urban sprawl and ugly buildings are her bêtes noires, though obesity, kitsch and fakery also attract her coruscating attention.

Blubberland is a curious mixture of diatribe and philosophical treatise on cultural theory. Farrelly makes many good points: tight-knit cities, for example, are more energy-efficient than sprawling suburbs, and the ‘sea-change’ fad destroys beauty spots with little increase in happiness. She wonders ‘[w]hy we demand a built lifestyle whose habitual over-indulgence is, by even the standards of our parents’ generation, extraordinary? … Why these houses, and the suburbs full of them, are so ugly? Is it an aesthetic or a moral repugnance?’ Notice the shift from ‘we’, meaning ‘you’ or ‘them’, to a subjective point of view where ‘our’ houses are viewed with repugnance. The most unattractive aspect of the book is this accusing tone couched in the inauthentic first person, used not to include herself with the faulty human race but as a rod with which to beat the rest of us. Musicians will be surprised to read that ‘only architects still revere beauty’, and anyone who believes that ‘times when sacred music, liturgy and architecture were troves of transcendent beauty are long gone’ is oblivious to Australia’s vibrant choral music scene. Criticising another writer’s work, Farrelly says, ‘Western cultural crisis is like mid-life crisis; perpetual, over-reported and often mildly enjoyable.’ Indeed.

T/here

By Judith Bishop

This is not a place for candles, or the scent of red cedar
gathered on a hill to burn, or native plum, lit at night
to hold the urgent dead at bay: you won’t wake to hear
the click of brumbies’ hooves on a road that flows
to where the humans are, or blink to see the mob
jittering in the dawn air:
                                this is not a house
of language, in the first sense of the word, the one
in which it made the world, this is not a place of origin,
ground, or single source: this is not a road for drinking
in the middle of the night: you won’t see
the ink of fire moving night and day across
the blotting paper of savannah, or the scorched paperbark
raining through a reddened dusk:
                                              and this is not a place
for gathering the raw fruits of the earth, or to learn
the names for lily root, honey, paperbark,
nor to hear the many uses
to which an axe gets put:
                                 for that is not a life
of plainness in the hope of life unending, nor a way
of being gentle on the earth.
                                      Here, you meet
no women keening for the death of only sons
on the lamplit urban roads, rock to skull, beating down
the dumb refusals of the mind:
                                          and this
is not a place for dreaming
on the memory of rocks, or to hear the rain that drops
as though a sea were in the sky, or watch erosion
on a scale both intimate
and eons wide.
                        From these walls I cannot read
the lineage of human lives.
Manyallaluk, NT; Sydney, NSW