Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

      Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus   (1922)

For what it is worth, my own view is that in contemporary Australia the dialectical quest for truth about the indigenous culture, by open argument and counter-argument, is no less important than about the culture of the invaders and oppressors. Both investigations, I believe, are best carried on by scholars whose primary loyalty is not to one heritage or the other but to the principle that nothing is sacrosanct except the spirit of free inquiry itself. The custodians of that particular flame are without race, as are their enemies.

           L.R. Hiatt, Arguments about Aborigines: Australia   and the Evolution of Social Anthropology (1996)

One morning early in 1994, a week or so after I began work at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, a colleague breezed into my office and dropped an envelope on my desk.

‘Thought you should see this,’ he said. ‘Thought you should know about the institution you’ve come to work for.’

I opened the flap and withdrew an eight-by-ten photographic print. It was a pretty confronting shot. It showed an exhibit: a small timber and glass case of no more than four or five cubic metres capacity, into which was compressed the whole of the culture and nineteenth-century history of the Palawa, the Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Framed and hanging at the top rear of the vitrine were 1830s portrait watercolours by the convict artist Thomas Bock and 1860s ‘anthropological’ photographs by Charles Woolley, a bas-relief plaster death mask and one of Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur’s famous ‘proclamation boards’. Below, on a plinth, was a bust of the Nuenonne tribal leader Woureddy. On the ground there was a scatter of grinding stones and abalone shells. Spears and waddies leaned up against the back wall, from which hung swags of shell necklaces, woven grass baskets, models of bark canoes. And right in the middle, mounted on a steel frame, standing on a black box which highlighted its smallness and fragility, was a human skeleton. A label proclaimed it to be that of ‘Lalla Rookh or Truganini. The Last Tasmanian Aborigine.’

I knew about Truganini’s skeleton, of course. I had done my history homework when I accepted the job. A replica had been displayed in the Museum of Victoria when I was a child. It was, as I recall, just to the left of the door that led into a room containing a number of Egyptian sarcophagi, one of them with parts of the skeleton visible through the mummy wrappings. And then, adjacent to the Egyptiana, there was an ethnographic gallery that included both a preserved Maori skull, with full facial tattoos, and a couple of Amazonian shrunken heads. These are the sorts of grisly encounters that little boys delight in (and remember forty years later): glimpses of the mortality mystery that the juvenile mind can only partly comprehend.

In grown-up Tasmania, extinction – of Aborigines and thylacines, at least – was fully known, fully upfront. Truganini’s bodily remains were on public display in the Museum from 1904 until as late as 1947. They were not returned to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community until 1976, a hundred years after Truganini’s death. That year, her skeleton was ceremonially cremated, and on 1 May the ashes were scattered in the waters of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel, near her birthplace, Lunawannaloona (Bruny Island).

Nineteen forty-seven? I idly ran the arithmetic through my head and deduced that many ‘born and bred’ Tasmanians in their late fifties or older would probably have seen Truganini on display in her glass case, would have formed their ideas of Aboriginal culture and society and history from that encounter, would have had the myth of ‘The Last Tasmanian Aborigine’ reinforced by the apparently incontrovertible evidence of the bones. Well, the Hobartians would, at least. In Launceston and the North West, the Bass Strait Islander families – the Maynards and the Mansells, the Browns and the Everetts – provided inconvenient, embarrassing living proof of black survival.

Such were the thoughts that this singular photograph began to provoke, connections that arose both in the memory and in the more conscious, academic mind. This was clearly a power object, even in its diluted, unoriginal ‘print from a copy neg’ form. The authenticity of the image, the physical and historical and human truth recorded by the anonymous photographer, was palpable.

The picture continued to haunt me over the next ten years as I pursued my curator’s investigations of the Museum’s collections, and my personal reading of Tasmanian history in particular and of Aboriginal–settler contact history in general. In this same period, the Australian nation worked through the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, the implicit racism of the One Nation Party, the High Court’s Wik decision on Native Title and the Howard government’s Ten Point Plan in response, the prime minister’s refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations, and the review and eventual abolition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. It was a difficult decade in many ways.

The so-called History Wars, the ideological conflict between ‘Black Armband’ and ‘Whitewash’ got into full swing. Henry Reynolds published half a dozen thoughtful, expansive titles on frontier conflict, from Fate of a Free People (1995) to This Whispering in our Hearts (1998); Keith Windschuttle responded with the mean mortuary accounting of The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Volume 1, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 (2002). Meanwhile, the Tasmanian Museum itself, feeling increasingly conscious of, and accountable for, both its historical shame and its contemporary responsibilities, moved to build and strengthen relationships with the local Aboriginal community, to reorient itself from conquest museum to reconciliation keeping place. Anthropology was renamed, and a Palawa man, Tony Brown, was appointed to a trainee curatorship in the new department of Indigenous Cultures.

Robert Dowling, Tasmanian Aborigines 1856–57, (courtesy of National Gallery of Victoria)

Amidst all these rhetorical gestures, all this ideological push and shove, there were times when I dearly wished I could have shown what I had come to think of simply as The Picture, either on its own, or within collection displays, or as part of an exhibition on the broader themes of conflict and reconciliation. I wanted to know other people’s reactions to it; wanted to share a variety of recollections, interpretations and storytelling by both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal commentators. But while I was possessed by the visceral power of the image, its extraordinary visual and historical richness, the possibilities it offered for subtle, creative exegesis, I recognised that I would never be able to display it publicly. In that particular historical, geographical, social and organisational context, The Picture was clearly taboo.

For Aboriginal Tasmanians it was a clear insult, both to a deceased ancestor and important community leader, as well as to the Palawa at large. For the Tasmanian Museum, it was evidence of the institution’s complicity in ‘scientific’ grave-robbing, in the worldwide nineteenth-century trade in indigenous skeletal material, and in perpetuating the myth of the Tasmanian genocide. It was also an uncomfortable reminder of the problem of sundry unidentified and unprovenanced human remains still pulsing radioactively in the Museum’s restricted-access storeroom. For both parties, this photograph would bring the past rather too uncomfortably into the present.

I considered alternative curatorial strategies. Perhaps we could display the picture in a separate area, behind a screen or curtain, with a warning about disturbing content. Or we could recreate the display and build a facsimile of the original vitrine, complete in all its details save for the skeleton itself. After all, the Museum still owned all the other stuff, all the art and artefacts. More cheaply, we could simply digitally edit the photograph and white-out the skeleton.

In the end, of course, I did nothing, for all the usual whitefella reasons. It was easier. There were plenty of other things on my plate at the time, and it wasn’t really my responsibility. While I was nominally Co-ordinating Curator of Art and Humanities, with a watching brief over History, Decorative Arts, Photography and Indigenous Cultures (all the disciplines represented in the vitrine), that was really a stopgap administrative convenience; I was mainly just the Art Guy. Besides, indigenous matters were particularly sensitive and always, and properly, necessitated both slow, complex community negotiations and the highest-level managerial and political sanction. Not my field. Beyond my competence. And they’d say no, anyway.

In the end, I felt I could probably do more by concentrating on the effective display and interpretation of material in my immediate care: Bock’s delicate watercolours of George Augustus Robinson’s ‘sable companions’ and of Mathinna, the pretty, barefoot girl in the red dress adopted for a time by Sir John and Lady Franklin; the fleeting images of Aborigines in the sketchbooks and landscapes of the observant, curious John Glover; Benjamin Duterrau’s ambitious history painting The Conciliation (1840) and its various associated prints and plaster reliefs; and an anonymous artist’s remarkable image of an Aboriginal guerrilla attack on the East Coast farm of settler John Allen during the Black War of 1828.

Thus did I talk myself out of that difficult artefactual corner. Thus did I avoid becoming mired in the slough of post-colonial despond. And I let The Picture, with its compelling visual, historical and political actualities, continue to lie hidden, unexamined, unexplained.

There was something else that took the wind out of my sails, out of the cape of the would-be curatorial crusader: the discovery that the image was in fact already in the public domain. It was published in 1977 in Dan Sprod’s Victorian and Edwardian Hobart from Old Photographs,¹ a book freely available in the State Library of Tasmania, the University of Tasmania Library – the Museum Library even. You could usually find a copy in one of Hobart’s antiquarian bookshops. By the time I left the Museum in 2004, you could even see The Picture on three or four websites.

In some ways, this made the situation even more difficult to deal with: professionally, ethically, morally. Here were public servants, public scholars in a state-funded museum who could not or would not display, let alone discuss, an important historical and cultural artefact, ostensibly out of respect for indigenous culture. I and my colleagues at the Museum were not only the authorised, official, institutional custodians of this image, but also had between us both the ethno-graphic and historical knowledge and the access to associated documentary and collection resources to be able to present, contextualise and interpret this most complex, layered image; yet in deference to indigenous sensitivities we remained silent.

My Tasmanian silence echoes in much historical and particularly art-historical writing. For settler Australian scholars with a conscience or simply a political consciousness, it seems absolutely necessary to correct British triumphalism and exclusivism and to fill the indigenous and immigrant gaps in the national record of visual culture. The year I arrived in Hobart, Andrew Sayers published his fine survey Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century (1994), introducing many Australians for the first time to such major figures as (William) Barak, Yackaduna (Tommy McRae) and Mickey of Ulladulla. Sayers’s book begins with a quite remarkable opposition of two works of art: a pencil drawing of the young Aboriginal ‘Black Johnny’ or ‘Johnny Dawson’ by the Austrian emigré Eugene von Guérard, and Johnny’s own portrait of von Guérard at work sketching. Dating from von Guérard’s visit to the Western District of Victoria in the winter of 1855, the two portraits were probably made on ‘Kangatong’, the estate of James Dawson, the man who commissioned one of von Guérard’s first Australian landscapes, Tower Hill (1855), whose interest in the language and culture of the local Aboriginal people, the Kirrae Wurrung, was almost unique amongst the pastoralists of the Port Phillip District, and who, in later life, would erect a handsome monument to Wombeetch Puyuun or ‘Camperdown George’, known as ‘the last of the local tribes’.²

‘For settler Australian scholars with a conscience or simply a political consciousness, it seems absolutely necessary to correct British triumphalism and exclusivism and to fill the indigenous and immigrant gaps in the national record of visual culture’

Such retrievals from the archive are vital. In the case of the Johnny–Eugene portrait pair, they can be charming, even moving in their summoning of harmonious Aboriginal–settler interaction on the frontier, no matter how rare that might have been. However, due to the very nature of traditional Aboriginal cultural practices and to the rapidity of white incursion, very little nineteenth-century Aboriginal art survives intact. Art historians’ consideration of the question of race relations in the contact zone therefore more usually takes the form of academic deconstruction of settler paintings which feature Aboriginal subjects.

Here we find ourselves not in embarrassed silence, but in the equally regrettable white noise of pious post-colonial cant, a world of ‘unequal power relations’, ‘the imperial project’, ‘post-Enlightenment tropes’, ‘binaries’, ‘imaginaries’, ‘agency’ and, of course, ‘discourse’. All too rarely are we given such things as primary sources, site investigations, and assessments of personal motives. With notable exceptions such as Paul Fox and Jennifer Phipps, Tom Griffiths, John Jones, Philip Jones and John McPhee (and these are all experienced curators, materialists), few academics choose to address the gritty specificities of life on the frontier.³ Representations of Aborigines are not calibrated against the lie of the land, the history of the invasion, the character of the parties involved, the specific sequence of particular incidents, or the sensitivity and technical accomplishment of the artist. Instead, we are presented with an abstract zone of retrospective judgement, a killing field of theory, a terra nullius where imported European aesthetic stock – the Picturesque, the Sublime, the Grotesque, the Melancholy – may safely graze.

Thus, the National Gallery of Victoria’s permanent collection display of early nineteenth-century Australian painting was in recent years rehung in postmodern mode, with its array of Aboriginal subjects including not only works by von Guérard, Glover and Robert Dowling, but also by the contemporary Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew. Such trans-historical adjacency can be a useful museological technique; since the 1980s, ‘interventions’ by contemporary artists have become a staple of gallery programs worldwide. In this instance, the disruption to the straightforward, diachronic presentation was Andrew’s well-known Sexy and Dangerous (1996). A striking image of a handsome young Yirrganydji chief from Barron River, Queensland, appropriated and modified from a Charles Kerry photograph taken around the turn of the twentieth century, Sexy and Dangerous was a useful prompt for viewers to reconsider their prejudices and assumptions with regard to the look of Aboriginality, past and present.

However, beyond the surprising, refreshing disjunction of medium and style, the new arrangement offered viewers little in the way of a point of entry into either the works or the issues with which they were confronted. The Dowling, for instance, Tasmanian Aborigines, is a particularly interesting picture. One of three similar works painted just before the artist left Van Diemen’s Land to study in London, it is partly documentary and partly nostalgic, partly classical and partly exotic. Dowling represents a group of ten Palawa gathered around a campfire in the wilderness, beneath the distant plateau and Organ Pipes of Mount Wellington. When this picture was painted (c.1856–57) there were only some sixteen ‘full-blood’ Tasmanian Aborigines left alive, all of them at the government settlement at Oyster Cove, south of Hobart Town. While the painting’s background might well suggest a view from that location, those few surviving Palawa certainly didn’t look like this group. At just around this time, Bishop Francis Russell Nixon photographed the Oyster Cove Aborigines, who sported long print dresses, waistcoats, woollen scarves and flop-top beanies. Dowling’s ‘noble savages’ are in fact direct transcriptions of the 1830s watercolours of Thomas Bock, from a set copied by the artist for Dowling’s father, the Rev. Henry Dowling. By comparing these originals with Dowling’s composition, we can identify these people by name. They are (standing, from the left): Timme (‘Bob’) from George’s River; Tunnerminnerwate or Peevay (‘Jack of Cape Grim’); Probelatena (‘Jemmy’) from the Hampshire Hills; (seated) an unidentifiable female; Truganini; an unidentifiable back-view figure; Larretong (‘Queen Andromache’) from Robbins Island; Woureddy (‘The Doctor’) from Bruny Island; Numbloote (‘Jenny’) from Port Sorell; and the East Coast chief Manalargenna.⁴ Yet with all this (and more) information readily accessible, the Gallery chose instead for its wall text an extended passage of dense post-colonial theory by the Palestinian–American intellectualEdward Said, a quote from his film The Shadow of the West (1986).⁵ No explanatory historical detail. No dignity of naming.

There is a grave risk in the contemporary emphasis on interpretation. Because the traditional, nineteenth-century way of doing art history is, these days, conventionally understood as complicit in the supposedly oppressive semiological and scopic régimes of the so-called Enlightenment Project, we stand back a little. The politically correct commentaries of the New Art History don’t actually touch the work of art, but sit above it, parallel to its surface, like a scrim of fine gauze, or that 1970s first generation of non-reflective glass. Fashionable academic casuistry actually blurs historical reality and, when there is difficulty or conflict, leaves you no clear point of view, no solid place to stand.⁶

‘Sotheby’s, Sotheby’s, leave them alone! Let us take our ancestors home!’ The chanting from the five women on the footpath outside drifted into the auction room every time the door opened. It was August 2009, and I was now working as a researcher for Sotheby’s Australia. Led by Nala Mansell-McKenna and Sarah Maynard, a delegation from the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre was in Melbourne to protest the sale of a pair of plaster busts of Truganini and Woureddy by the Sheffield silversmith and colonial settler Benjamin Law. Ironically, the Woureddy in the Tasmanian Museum’s Aboriginal vitrine was cast from this same edition.

These two extraordinary works of art, the first sculptures made and exhibited in British Australia, combine a high level of artistic literacy and manual skill (in the neoclassical, Roman style of busts and socles), of careful ethnographic observation (in the kangaroo-skin cloaks, in Truganini’s close-cropped hair and maireener shell necklaces, in Woureddy’s ochred dreadlocks and kangaroo-sinew torcs); and what appears to have been an acute eye for likeness and character. Made in Hobart Town in 1835 and 1836, when the local fame of ‘The Conciliator’ George Augustus Robinson and his Palawa negotiating team was at its height, Law’s busts were warmly received, the naturalist and journalist John Lhotsky describing them as ‘perfect likenesses … altogether a respectable work’.⁷ Several of the edition of some thirty casts were bought by Lieutenant-Governor Arthur, while others were sent abroad: to England and Scotland, even India and Sweden. Later overlooked by Australian art historians, they were reconsidered and admitted to the canon during the 1980s. Since then pairs of busts have been acquired and placed on permanent display in the National Gallery of Australia and most state art galleries.

For the demonstrators, however, the art history of the busts was irrelevant. The chanting and Aboriginal flag-waving of the women outside Sotheby’s were at once symbolic protests and protests against symbols. In the first instance, Woureddy and Truganini, and especially Truganini, still stand as signifiers of the Tasmanian Aborigines’ extirpation. In nineteenth-century anthropological discourse, with its setting of British imperial supremacism and Social Darwinist racism, the death of ‘The Last Tasmanian Aborigine’ illustrated the superiority of Anglo-Saxon civilisation and the inevitable decline and disappearance of indigenous peoples, not only in Australia but across the world. Of course, such cold scientism was never the whole story of European colonial attitudes. For some settlers, such as James Dawson, the dispossession and deaths of Aboriginal populations were deeply troubling.

But regardless of the moral and political stance adopted by contemporary white witnesses and interpreters, the extinction of the race was quickly and widely accepted as fact, and largely remains so in the popular imagination. Truganini is every bit as much ‘The Last Tasmanian Aborigine’ in Robert Drewe’s 1978 novel The Savage Crows, in Bernard Smith’s 1980 Boyer Lectures, The Spectre of Truganini, in Gordon Bennett’s 1989 painting Requiem, and in Midnight Oil’s rock album Truganini (1993), as she is in her glass case in The Picture.⁸

Indeed, it was the title of a largely sympathetic account, Tom Haydon’s passionate and sorrowful documentary The Last Tasmanian (1978), that prompted some of Aboriginal Tasmania’s earliest public assertions of survival and identity. The film’s poster, with its central image of Truganini staring into Charles Woolley’s camera lens, carried the tagline ‘The story of the swiftest and most effective genocide on record’. Angry at being thus denied their very existence, Aboriginal Tasmanians picketed cinemas, the young Michael Mansell debated with the film’s director on ABC television’s Monday Conference and mainland, mainstream Australia got a swift kick in the socio-historical assumptions.

Since that time, the racial and familial heritage of the Palawa has been widely and publicly explored and explained. Residual traditional practices – mutton-birding, the collecting, burnishing and stringing of maireener and rice shell necklaces, the making of baskets and vessels from grass and kelp – have been documented, preserved, revived and celebrated. From the word-list ruins of a dozen pre-contact indigenous languages, Tasmanian Aboriginal speech is being revived as palawa kani. In a recent and spectacular piece of cultural reclamation, Tony Brown, at the Tasmanian Museum, coordinated the making of a full-size bark canoe based on the nineteenth-century scale models held in the Museum, the work being undertaken by four Tasmanian Aboriginal men: Brendon ‘Buck’ Brown, Shane Hughes, Sheldon Thomas and Tony Burgess. After generations of denial and shame, some 8000 Tasmanians now proudly self-identify as Aboriginal.

Thierry frères, lithographers, after Benjamin Law (1807–1890), sculptor, Trouggarnanna, Native de Sullivan-cove, Wan-Dieménie (Mélanésie) c.1850, lithograph, from Charles Jacquinot (ed.), Voyage au Pôle Sud et dans l’Océanie: sur les corvettes l’Astrolabe et la Zélée, exécutée ... pendant les années 1837– 1838–1839–1840, sous le commandement de M.J. Dumont d’Urville, Paris: Gide, 1841–1855, Atlas: Anthropologie, plate 23, La Trobe Rare Books Collection, State Library of Victoria

Yet this renaissance has not exorcised ‘the spectre of Truganini’. In 2009, a generation after the release of The Last Tasmanian, the issue was still (for Michael Mansell at least) that the sculptures ‘convey the racist image that they were the last Tasmanian Aboriginal people … To make money out of images that convey such a racist impression [to] the rest of Australia and indeed the world, is to vilify the Aboriginal people now and treat us with ridicule and contempt.’⁹

Furthermore, this central message was also freighted with implications and with references to other settler offences. The protesters’ demand for the ‘return’ of the bust sounded a strong echo of the rightful moral claims of Aboriginal communities on skeletal and other human remains held in museum collections across the world. This matter remains a particularly sensitive one; after all, it was not until 2005 that London’s Royal College of Surgeons returned their ‘scientific’ samples of Truganini’s hair and skin to her people in Tasmania. Works of art are not such remains.

The issue was further confused through the implicit suggestion that the display of the portraits was somehow inappropriate: ‘If you make a sculpture of the dead, the spirit of those people can be captured.’¹⁰ Here, the Aboriginal Tasmanians would appear to have borrowed from their Northern Territory cousins a traditional law protocol in relation to death: the burning or burying of the personal effects of the deceased, and the prohibition on speaking their name for the duration of mourning. In traditional Central Desert culture, these prohibitions are designed to prevent slippage or contamination between the worlds of the living and of the dead. Aborigines recognise that only a thin and permeable boundary separates current, everyday economic and social activity from the fundamental, primordial, metaphysical spaces and structures of where we come from and where we go to: the Dreaming, or, to use anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner’s preferred translation, the Abiding. Border crossings need to be carefully managed by appropriate ceremony, whether at times of initiation, marriage, funerary and other rituals, or when different neighbouring groups meet and exchange songs, dances and stories.

In the whitefella way, in the European, secular, Enlightenment tradition, this ceremony is the practice of history. In doing history, we examine and interpret documents and artefacts in order that the people of the past might live again briefly in the present, and in that resuscitation help us to understand ourselves. In white history’s ritual, its law, its tjukurrpa, you cannot take contemporary understandings and judgements back across the temporal border, only contemporary questions. You can’t tell the dead how to behave, or what to say. Which brings us back to Truganini and the Benjamin Law bust. It is not right that this handsome work of art should be held to stand either as some kind of symbol of the Tasmanian ethnocide or, contrariwise, as an emblem of discredited Social Darwinism. It is not the sculpture that conveys the extinction myth, but the way the image is and has been used in another past, a later past.

Law’s work dates from 1836, when there were still the best part of two hundred ‘full-blood’ Palawa living, more than twenty years before the publication of The Origin of Species, and a good forty years before the sitter’s death. As a recent arrival in the colony keen to make a name for himself, Law made his portraits of Truganini and Woureddy because they were then famous. These two were the longest-serving and most prominent of George Augustus Robinson’s treaty group, the negotiators responsible for bringing an end to the bloody Black War. (Law’s only other known bust, of Robinson himself, has been lost.) The members of the ‘Friendly Mission’ were the heroes of the hour, and had earned the gratitude of the entire settler community; Robinson and ‘his’ people were A-list colonial celebrities. The year after Law made his Truganini bust, Jane Franklin, wife of the new lieutenant-governor, was to commission fourteen watercolour portraits of Robinson’s Palawa friends from Thomas Bock, and that same year 113 residents of Hobart Town would successfully petition the Executive Council, urging the public purchase of Benjamin Dutterau’s oils of Truganini, Woureddy, Tanlebouyer and Manalargenna. The four paintings hung for many years in the chamber of the Tasmanian Legislative Council, and were eventually transferred to the Tasmanian Museum.

Smart and vivacious, young and attractive, Truganini was a particular popular favourite. Nicknamed ‘Lalla Rookh’, after the exotic oriental princess in Thomas Moore’s then enormously popular eponymous poem, she was, like the Kuringgai man Bungaree in Sydney a decade earlier, the leading indigenous pin-up. She even had a boat named after her: a cargo schooner built by William Williamson, in 1838. Before all those 1860s and 1870s photographs, before she inherited the tragic title of ‘The Last Tasmanian Aborigine’, she had been sketched or painted not only by Bock and Dutterau, but also by Glover, Thomas Napier and John Skinner Prout. Law’s bust tallies closely with these paper images in terms of Truganini’s general appearance, but has the greater realism of three dimensions. As the Hobart Town Courier observed at the time, the work is ‘completed in exquisite style closely resembling nature’.¹¹

Because it is a handmade object, because it has required slow, careful scrutiny, certainly well beyond the few seconds of a wet-plate photographic exposure, the sculpture necessarily implies a certain level of communication, of relationship between artist and sitter. This assumption would seem to be borne out by an 1838 letter written by Law’s wife, Hannah. The Laws’ close acquaintance Daniel Wheeler, a Quaker missionary, had recently returned to England, taking with him casts of the Truganini and Woureddy busts. Addressing a cousin in Sheffield, Hannah Law writes:

‘… no doubt our dear friend D.Wheel[er] has arrived in Sheffd we have spent many pleasant hours with him here … he is accompanied by the Black Lady and Gentleman Wouraddy and Trucaninny I hope they will meet with a courteous reception from the Cutlers company I assure you I have a great respect for them Trucaninny has often sat on the carpet at my feet and sung to me while I was working then she would say shuppe wine Missie Law I would give her a glass she would sing again, then shuppe wine I would say no Triggy you’ll be ill, O you ugly Ole woman she would say very well Triggy go away don’t expect any thing from me again then she would cry O you vary nice lady Messa Law fine fellow …’¹²

Here we catch the echo of Truganini’s negotiating skills in action. In concrete form, we see the abstract ‘agency’ that is such a staple of contemporary historical jargon. Truganini is observed maintaining her cultural identity through song, offering that song to Hannah Law, demanding a reciprocal gift in the form of a glass of wine, becoming angry and insulting when denied a second glass, and then, when threatened, backing down and schmoozing up. This is a real person, and, even through the creole speech, a pretty canny operator. If we imagine Truganini only as the Last Tasmanian Aborigine, as the grizzled, overweight old lady terrified by the certain prospect of her posthumous mutilation, we lose touch with the vitality of this young woman’s resistance.

The young Truganini would not be constrained. She seized the opportunity to escape the Flinders Island detention centre by accompanying Robinson to the Port Phillip district in 1839. When she and a number of her compatriots turned bushranger, she was undoubtedly complicit and may even have been the initiator of the consequent killings, thefts and arson at Cape Patterson on Westernport Bay. Her young male companions, Peevay and Timme (aka ‘Bob’ and ‘Jack’), were tried, sentenced and hanged for murder, the first executions conducted in Victoria under British law. Truganini escaped the gallows on that occasion, but never forgave Robinson for what she evidently considered his abandonment of the Palawa. She was to cut him dead when he visited Oyster Cove in 1851.¹³

In Melbourne, 2009, in response to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre protests and in consultation with the owners of the works, Sotheby’s withdrew the Benjamin Law portraits from sale. Nala Mansell-McKenna, Secretary of the Centre, said the plaster busts should be returned to Tasmania, where a community meeting would decide their fate. In a subsequent letter to the eleven museums that hold casts in their collections, Ms Mansell-McKenna wrote: ‘Aborigines find it offensive that images of our dead are still being used without permission. We now write seeking agreement on what items can, or should not, be displayed.’

It is at this point that I take offence. I certainly strongly endorse the necessary courtesy (or simple precaution) of keeping secret-sacred Aboriginal material from inappropriate public view. I can readily accept the indigenous perspective that human remains should not be put on display and should, if possible, be returned to their descendants and laid to rest in their country. However, the proposed censorship of secular images I can neither understand nor sanction. For a start, there are not so many such pictures that we can afford to lose sight of any of them. Moreover, the suppression of images is plain silly, both impractical in the age of the Internet and simply wrong in terms of the evolution of Aboriginal culture since 1788. As Philip Jones has observed in his account of ethnographic photography in South Australia: ‘It is ironic … that more than two centuries after traditional attitudes towards images began to loosen, reflecting a dynamic series of shifts and revisions within Aboriginal societies, Australian cultural institutions and television channels began adopting restrictive access protocols towards Aboriginal imagery.’¹⁴

Most importantly, though, restriction is wrong because all works of art containing images of Aboriginals that have been made by settler artists since Europeans first explored, invaded and occupied Australia, whether sketched, drawn, painted, carved, modelled, caricatured or designed (and even written, sung, acted, danced or filmed), are necessarily, by definition, documents of coexistence, of a shared identity of place and, later, of nation. They may well document oppression of Aboriginal people in what they depict or in the manner of the depiction. They may describe or embody or have had attached to them profound misunderstandings of traditional and developing indigenous cultures. But they are, in the end, undeniable, irreducible historical objects, necessary vehicles both for understanding the past and for constructing the future.

For me the most difficult and disappointing aspect of the affair of the Benjamin Law busts was therefore the response of the art-historical and curatorial establishment. An editorial in the Hobart Mercury sensibly observed that ‘it would be better to change people’s perception of [Truganini’s] place in history, not try to banish her image’, and, in the Australian Art Sales Digest, Aboriginal art consultant Jane Raffan likewise called for cultural institutions to ‘actively investigate the historical context of [the busts’] production’. There were also a handful of letters to newspapers and sundry blog posts, but the only extended analyses of the fracas were by the conservative columnists Christopher Pearson, in The Australian, and John Izzard, in Quadrant, who seized the opportunity to lambast ‘new-think culture’, ‘gesture politics’ and the ‘ultra-left Aboriginal fringe’.¹⁵ But from the academics and curators whose daily professional practice depends on access to images, artefacts and works of art, not a word.

I think I know why. For the academics, the affair was not a debate to become involved in, but a cultural phenomenon to observe. A post-colonial conflict, an ‘iconic’ image, political party involvement, an art market angle, the Aboriginal flag, gender binaries – such are the materials of contemporary art history. What’s more, it was all readily available on the Internet, without any need to look up obscure articles in the Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, let alone to pursue primary sources such as Ross’s Hobart Town Almanack and Van Diemen’s Land Annual for 1836, or, dare I suggest, to examine closely the works themselves. I await the inevitable Cultural Studies conference paper with interest. For the museum directors and curators, to be perceived to be defending the buying and selling of works of art against the strongly expressed wishes of an indigenous organisation would probably entail a risk of loss of confidence from their various Aboriginal constituencies and, more practically, potential disruption to their own delicate, sensitive ongoing negotiations with regard to Aboriginal collections past, present and future.

‘if reconciliation is to get any real traction in this country, it must be based on demonstrable empirical truths, it must be about particularities, about individuals’

This is simply cowardice and evasion. I know, because it is precisely the same cowardice and evasion I myself displayed not so long ago with regard to The Picture. Nobody wants to stand up to people whose land was stolen, whose ancestors were murdered, whose children were taken away, whose life expectancy is twenty years less than that of the rest of the Australian population and say: ‘No, sorry, mate, you’re wrong about this one.’ But if reconciliation is to get any real traction in this country, it must be based on demonstrable empirical truths, it must be about particularities, about individuals. It will not be achieved by silent acquiescence to misguided enthusiasm, or by ambit claims and politically correct slogans, which simply provide ammunition for the culture warriors of the right.

The story and the imagery of Truganini of the Nuenonne from Lunawannaloona provide an object lesson to those who practise ideological art history and museology, to the purveyors of postmodern platitudes. The people who inhabit the Abiding are every bit as difficult as the living. They cannot be constrained by intellectual postures or fashions, only by the material and documentary truths of their lives and deaths. It is a primary responsibility of non-indigenous historians to uncover and interpret those truths, and to offer them back to Aboriginal Australia. It is our profession’s way of paying the rent.

We shouldn’t expect any thanks. We have seen how a close address to the Benjamin Law bust gives us Hannah Law’s letter and through it Truganini’s voice. Truganini also speaks through the works of Annie Benbow, a Tasmanian settler woman who grew up at Oyster Cove in the 1840s, whose family knew the Palawa well as neighbours and who accompanied Truganini on a visit across the Channel to her Bruny Island home. Late in life, Benbow made a number of remarkable drawings of the Oyster Cove establishment, based on her childhood memories. One of these drawings is in the collection of the TMAG, and amidst its frieze of hunting and feasting Palawa and their dogs, there is the irrepressible Lalla Rookh, climbing up a tree. Pursuing this picture and its artist, I was made aware of an obscure article in The Lone Hand of June 1913, in which the author recounts an interview with Benbow and her recollections of Truganini.¹⁶ Here, hidden within or behind the art object, or at least tracked and accessed through that object, is something not found in the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery’s Aboriginal display case: a small piece of missing history, of raw vengeance, of the very spirit of resistance.

One of the old Queen[’s] stories ran as follows: a white man was burning oyster shell on the Brune [sic] shore. A black man crept up and speared him and the wounded man ran some distance with the spear through his body before he fell down and died.

Just look at those eyes. Truganini can take care of herself. 

Endnotes

1 Dan Sprod (ed), Victorian and Edwardian Hobart from Old Photographs, John Ferguson, 1977.

2Andrew Sayers, Aboriginal Artists of the Nineteenth Century, OUP in association with the National Gallery of Australia, 1994, pp 1–4.

3 Paul Fox and Jennifer Phipps, Sweet Damper and Gossip: Colonial Sightings from the Goulburn and North-East, Benalla Art Gallery, 1994; Tom Griffiths, Hunters and Collectors: The Antiquarian Imagination in Australia, Cambridge University Press, 1996; John Jones, The Wares, Mopors, Robert Dowling and Eugene von Guérard in the Western District of Victoria in the 1850s, National Gallery of Australia, 1998; Philip Jones, Ochre and Rust: Artefacts and Encounters on Australian Frontiers, Wakefield Press, 2007; John McPhee, Joseph Lycett: Convict Artist, Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 2006.

4 These identifications were recently confirmed when the wax lining of the painting was removed, revealing notations by Dowling himself. Additionally, the seated figure on the left is denominated ‘Jinny/West Coast/VDL’. My thanks to Michael Varcoe-Cox, Helen Gill and Humphrey Clegg for kindly showing me the work during the course of its conservation treatment.

5 The Shadow of The West (Producers Colin Luke and Geoff Dunlop; Director Geoff Dunlop; Writer/narrator Edward Said), Part 7 of the 10-part Landmark Films series The Arabs: A Living History (1979–1983).

6 Quite literally, in some cases. See, for example, Jeanette Hoorn’s confusion of the Blue Mountains’ Bathurst (Apsley) and Wentworth (Weatherboard) Falls, in Australian Pastoral: The Making of a White Landscape, Fremantle Press, 2007, p. 42.

7 John Lhotsky, ‘Australia, in its historical evolution’, The Art Union, July 1839, pp 99–100.

8 Robert Drewe, The Savage Crows, William Collins, 1976; Bernard Smith, The Spectre of Truganini, Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980; Gordon Bennett, Requiem, oil on canvas, 120 x 120 cm, coll: Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; Midnight Oil, Truganini, Columbia Records, 1993.

9 Michael Mansell, interviewed on P.M., ABC Radio National, 24 August 2009.

10 Michael Mansell, quoted in Christopher Pearson, ‘Works of art pressed into another service’, Australian, 29 August 2009.

11 Hobart Town Courier, 7 October 1836.

12 Letter, Hannah Law to Thomas Ellin, 22 May 1838, in Paul Paffen and Margaret Glover, ‘The Hannah and Benjamin Law Letters’ in Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, vol. 45, no. 3, September 1998, p. 178.

13 An account of the Port Phillip District episode was presented on Hindsight, ABC Radio National, 8 February 2009.

14 Philip Jones, ‘Ethnographic Photography in South Australia’, in Julie Robinson and Maria Zagala, A Century in Focus: South Australian Photography 1840s–1940s, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007, p. 105.

15 ‘Seeing the Real Picture’ (editorial), Mercury, 25 August 2009; Jane Raffan, ‘Withdraw the Benjamin Law Busts? A Contrary View’ in Australian Art Sales Digest (online edition) 23 August 2009; Christopher Pearson, op. cit.; John Izzard, ‘Return of the Culture Wars’, Quadrant (online edition) 31 August 2009.

16 Annie Benbow (1841–1917), Aborigines and Settlers at Oyster Cove in 1847, pencil on paper, 50 x 72 cm, coll: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; James Hebblethwaite, ‘Mr C. Benbow’s Fruitful Land’, The Lone Hand, 2 June 1913, quoted in Eve Buscombe, Portraits of the Aborigines, Eureka Research, 1980 (n.p.).

Odd to start by quoting P.G. Wodehouse: ‘She was a girl with a wonderful profile, but steeped to the gills in serious purpose.’ Bertie Wooster is complaining, in ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’¹, about Honoria Glossop, who has forced upon him ‘Types of Ethical Theory’. ‘Odd’ because anyone steeped to the gills in serious purpose would not take Wodehouse as a literary starting point. Wodehouse confessed himself uninterested in politics and affairs of the nation, and people in general. He saw himself in Bertie and all the other fellows from the Drones Club, with the possible exception of Psmith, who was a dabbler in socialism. So the self-contrived scrapes of an indolent young English gentlemen and his valet’s ingenious rescues would probably not make it on the must-read list for people of serious purpose.

Although no longer a girl, I am a bit like Honoria. I have been, since early youth, steeped to the gills in serious purpose. My shelves are loaded with books on ethics, social and moral philosophy, and some on theology. I confess I am likely to lend books bearing suffering, pain or alienation in the title. It is the wonderful profile that gives me pause. Wodehouse probably pictured a woman with a shapely figure, long legs, fine skin, pretty face and excellent styling – hair and clothes. Not me. I claim a wonderful profile because my body is mutilated and odd, and I get around unconventionally. I inhabit what Rose-Marie Garland-Thomson calls ‘a stareable body’.²

Although over the years I have come to modify my internal, reflexive gaze to recognise my new body-self, I remember the first few times that I took this stareable body out in public – after I had made my own tentative explorations in front of a mirror. Wondering at my new form, shocked and interested, repelled and compelled to gaze again. It was like that. I did not go out; I took the body out. The internal body-frame no longer matched the one I saw. I had to learn how to look anew at myself. And those early encounters did not help. In the eyes of those I dared to meet (starers), I saw my own shock and titillation, the same desire to look away and the craving to focus and take apart and put together again. Even after almost thirty-five years, I still catch myself doing it.

Michel de Montaigne, in the sprawling rave ‘Of Cripples’,³ reveals that ‘the more does my own deformity astonish me, the less I understand myself’. He also tells us why, persuaded by the ancients, he has come to convince himself that ‘I have formerly made myself believe that I have had more pleasure in a woman by reason she was not straight, and accordingly reckoned that deformity amongst her graces’. He is convinced of the increased vitality of the genitalia when the limbs are deformed. I will return to this: but first, a more serious purpose.

‘Counting deformity as one of our graces is precisely the task. And the path to this is via wonderment and its concomitant: becoming wonderful.’

Counting deformity as one of our graces is precisely the task. And the path to this is via wonderment and its concomitant: becoming wonderful. Wonderment is often connected to beauty and grace, like Honoria’s profile, something to inspire rapture and awe, or, better, erotic, even carnal, contemplation. One stands on a precipice of attraction, desire and uplift – made more delightful because of its precariousness; you totter unprotected by repressive rationality. You are exposed to a life-altering encounter, one that might be the turning point in a loveless or cheerless life. Some people are better at it than others. Children, having yet to learn repressive rationality, and older people, having forsaken it as too tiresome, seem more open to the wonderful than are those of us filled with serious purpose. Perhaps they are concerned with the thing, not so much the reason why. Montaigne goes on:

I was just now ruminating, as I often do, what a free and roving thing human reason is. I ordinarily see that men, in things propounded to them, more willingly study to find out reasons than to ascertain truth: they slip over presuppositions, but are curious in examination of consequences; they leave the things, and fly to the causes.

Perhaps this too-soon flight to the causes deprives us of the lessons to be found on the precipice of wonderment.

Much has been said about staring in all its baroque forms – looking, gazing, ogling, eyeing off, goggle-eyedness, lasciviousness, gawking, gaping, watching. A fresh taxonomy will not help us here, but we can agree that, in extravagant looking and elaborate avoidance in the encounter with the mutilated as well as the gorgeous, we cross the threshold of the precipice of wonderment. This is Rudolf Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the dual numinous forces of fear and fascination.⁴ Otto is describing our encounter with the Holy Other; I am talking about our encounter with a definitely unholy other – not the polar opposite of the divine (the demonic), but the unsightly, unfamiliar, odd other. So, no, I do not think that when I enter these baroque moments I embody divinity for my starer, but I am taking them, initially at least, to a place that most of the great psychoanalysts would agree we all want to avoid: a confrontation with the ghastly certainty that life is fragile, easily wrecked and fleeting. (Being a goddess is the other matter to which Montaigne alludes.)

A wonderful profile is particularly troublesome in certain places. Indeed, a companion once complained that he hated going out with me because in the stares I attracted he felt that his capacity to pass anonymously through the crowd was compromised. He didn’t like the attention. The symbolic interactionists make sense here when they argue that contexts construct our perceptions. My body is not overly stareable in a hospital – it is what people expect there. Hospitals are, after all, gathering places for the horrible and those approaching death. Casinos are not. A telltale sign of ‘this is a place where the wonderfully horrible do not belong’ is the presence of staircases. Perhaps ironically then, the stage for Encounter One is a lift foyer.

A friend and I, both dressed up, had swanned off to a casino, not so much for gambling as for the lure of glamour, an uncommon pursuit for toilers in the sisterhood of purposefulness. We were young, not goddesses, but more than presentable and completely ill-prepared for the exaggerated, externalised verbal reaction of a group of young men disembarking from the lift we were about to enter. Their insults and faux vomiting, their staggering about in revulsion, their loud assurances to each other, placed me centre stage in a scene that embroiled my friend and other innocents in a drama about the drunken solipsism of young men searching for female sex partners. It was a moment of mutual horror, the frozen-in-time quality broken by my friend propelling me out of their sight. I shook for ages; it took the fun right out of the evening: the numinous fascinans lost in their sexism, and my shame. (I take comfort in the retributive fantasy that some sublime beauty rejected them before the night was out.)

Erving Goffman⁵ and his fellow symbolic interactionists use dramaturgy to help us work out what is going on here. In simplified form their theories are well known. Individuals marked for stigma must first possess spectacular differences and then attract adverse social reactions. Some targeted people manage to get away with it. Even though they belong to a stigmatised group because of their sexuality (for example), they may conceal their choices and pass as ‘normal’. Many of us who are physically impaired cannot. We are ‘out’ whether we choose to be or not. And so we have to learn ways of managing our attractiveness in the wonderment staring (and shaming) stakes. This process is called impression management. The early symbolic inter-actionists said that those of us with spoiled identities select various masks in this drama of managing our stigma. In short, they said we choose from ingratiation, intimidation and supplication. All these strategies advance our desire to get something out of the other: perhaps recognition and inclusion; a space to be ourselves; or a service. Drawing on social psychology, they also argue that the person with the wonderful profile also acts to protect herself from the pain of the internalised or introjected horror at the self.

Using this framework, the encounter in the casino had me moving away self-protectively and seeking reassurance from my ‘wise’ friend. She is considered wise because she is not marked by my stigma but is knowing and accepting of it. Most galling is the fact that I had employed an impression management strategy to enter that fun palace. I had attempted to ingratiate myself by dressing à la mode, by going with a normaland by paying my own way. For most patrons it worked, but no ploy could distract the boozy boyos from the image of oddness that so captured their attention. They stumbled off the precipice into horror.

I want, at times like that, to affirm Emily Post’s etiquette rules enjoining others not to stare but to turn away politely and to pass by on the other side. Yet Encounter Two reminds me that such politeness is really only another form of socially sanctioned abandonment; another pathway to shame.

Processions in cathedrals come with all manner of pomp and pomposity, of hierarchical huffing and episodes of episcopal self-elevation. The organ music and choir, the standing congregation, the space, the distance from door to stalls, the whish of gowns, the creak of seldom-worn leather shoes, the clutter of cross and thurible, all floating over the mundane mutterings of the processants. I, as chaplain, was the least among them and the last in line. When I arrived at the stalls no seats were left. While I clambered around (lots of stairs) trying to find a spot to settle before retreating to the pews, nobody moved or spoke or looked or yielded. Tactful inattention, smugness or abandonment? Next day I received a formal apology, which only slightly eased the sting of being out of place. (I resisted another retributive fantasy in which the clerics, stripped of their vestments, noted their naked ordinariness with a touch of disappointment.)

‘Taking the stareable body out in public never ceases to challenge and provoke me.’

These two vignettes are illustrative of multiple encounters in the thirty-five years of my oddness. Taking the stareable body out in public never ceases to challenge and provoke me. Just being out means dealing with wonderment. So if wonderment leads to a rejection based on horror or denial, how can I, following Montaigne, count deformity amongst my graces? Goffman and Co. would have me protectively and self-deceptively wearing a mask and hanging out with the wise. My colleagues in the disability movement would have me taking up a form of cripple in-your-faceness. This might be viewed as intimidation or as an effective disruptive strategy in the classic drama. And I confess I have enjoyed myself on many occasions by confronting others with the oddness.

Or, I could take up being a goddess.

John Steinbeck points the way when, in The Grapes of Wrath, he has the Joad boys telling the one-eyed mechanic to stop crying, to fill in the hole and get out there – just like the one-legged whore who is being paid more than her intact colleagues. It might be tacky, but, if you are interested, you only have to do a simple Internet search to enter the worlds of the devotees. It is a playground for the contemporary Montaigne – those people who, for reasons disputed by all players and the psychiatrists, are convinced of Montaigne’s conclusion that sex is better with a crippled woman. Though I am not going to explore the proclivities of others here, I must acknowledge that, for some, the arrangement seems to please all players. I have had completely benign and essentially uninteresting contacts with those who see in me a goddess of gorgeous deformity. This also takes the fun out of the evening. And I do not indulge in any fantasies!

At this point, it is tempting to condemn those with unreconstructed attitudes and lowbrows, but I want to stick with Montaigne’s suggestion that we should stay with the thing and not fly to the causes (or other elegant makings of meaning). Yet it seems I am running out of options here. All the identified responses to wonderment – revulsion, ignorance and worship – are too intense and do not match the emotions of the simple social encounters of the daily round. They do not offer a pathway to a quiet transformation.

So the daily challenge remains: when I take the body out in public, am I conscious, confident, proud, courageous and competent? Is there something authentic about this, or is it simply my latest mask? And when the day is done and the technology stacked against the wall, I must ask: can my mother look upon me with delight and not with sorrow? Can my children see me just as I should be? Can I dance naked in the bright, desiring gaze of my lover? Can I know myself as beautiful as well as strong? Can I gawk at myself with love and not with horror or sadness? Must I accept the moral enjoinder of Shirley in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of the same name?

You held out your palm for an egg and fate put into it a scorpion. Show no consternation. Close your fingers firmly upon the gift; let it sting through your palm. Never mind, in time, after your hand and arm have swelled and quivered long with torture, the squeezed scorpion will die and you will have learned a great lesson – how to endure without a sob.⁶

Nineteenth-century Brontë builds on a long philosophical tradition about the place of sorrow and social isolation. Am I condemned to live with the impaired happiness of Aristotle’s ugly man? Aristotle wrote at length on happiness, work that is receiving renewed attention from those who can see that justice is important to life satisfaction.⁷ If Montaigne sees the deformity as a grace, Brontë as a lesson in silent affliction, does Aristotle help us to see it as a good, as contributing to the proper equipment, as a virtue? Here, to these interlocutors at least, is another odd thing. Although I look unfortunate and continue with the loss, I enjoy all the external goods: good education, good job, good children, good lover, good house, good health, good friends, good community. This disjuncture in impressions simply serves to illustrate the point that wonderment seems to get in the way of seeing the full story of me. Yet it persists.

I am interested in the transforming potential of these encounters, not only for my own sense of dignity but also for that of others. This is the point of being steeped to the gills in serious purpose. If we only focus on the etiquette of encounters between those of us with wonderful profiles and those who find themselves in a state of wonderment, we miss identifying opportunities to reduce shame, to increase life-honouring social connections and to help us all transform our relationships with our own bodies. In saying this I am mindful of Montaigne’s caution as he reflects further on cripples:

‘I am interested in the transforming potential of these encounters, not only for my own sense of dignity but also for that of others’

Great abuses in the world are begotten, or, to speak more boldly, all the abuses of the world are begotten, by our being taught to be afraid of professing our ignorance, and that we are bound to accept all things we are not able to refute: we speak of all things by precepts and decisions.

This makes the task even harder. If I take Montaigne’s caution to heart, I must try, for as long as possible anyway, to put aside the precepts that come so readily in these discussions. Precepts I have already mentioned: etiquette, dramaturgy, pride (or anger), tearless resignation and erotic appeal. I cannot make this encounter work unless I confess that I do not know at the outset from where the mutual meaning might emerge.

In 1980, for four months, I worked as a student social worker in a legal agency for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. On my first day I met Monny. All my contact with her happened in my office, on the street, in the watch-house, the jail or the psychiatric ward of a large hospital. Monny never came to my house, had a meal with me, drove in my car or went shopping with me. I introduced her to only a couple of my friends. Encounter Three occurred in this context.

Monny was born in the late 1950s, in north Queensland. She died in Brisbane in 1983. When I met Monny, her life was the antithesis of all that I thought was decent. As a member of Australia’s indigenous nation, the travesty of life offered her was even more disturbing. And she knew why. She urgently, plaintively, proudly, desperately, defiantly – almost like a mantra – cried out, ‘Why are we fucking black?’

To many, the cause of Monny’s pain was her consumption of massive quantities of alcohol, her reluctance to settle, her provocative dancing, her swearing, her love of popular music and bright clothes, her anger, her violence, her self-destructiveness, her rowdiness, her contempt for the police, her non-compliance with white doctors, lawyers and social workers, her childhood, her lack of moral strength. She was a person to pity, to recoil from; whose death under the wheels of a truck was a release, a timely end to a life going nowhere, the most effective conclusion to so much suffering. But Monny knew her pain came from being homeless in her own land.

As a social worker, you are kitted out with some slick person skills that should take you into the world of any person in poverty and despair. You help the person change, but only if they want to. You set life goals, assist people to re-channel their anger and to acquire life skills and self-esteem. Having honed your skills, you move on to other fellow citizens. You assess, refer, problem solve, advocate, counsel, report and terminate – ever professional, non-judgemental, confidential, empathetic, self-determining – staying distanced, non-collusive, never personally involved.

That is where I got into strife. I liked this feisty woman and was repelled by the chaos of her life. The remnant of my Anglican schoolgirl persona could never quite wrap itself around the horribleness of it all. It was worse: I knew I had nothing to offer.

It was a bitter lesson that one who had lost all was urged to rely on one who had gained much and still ended up empty-handed. I just did not know what to do. All my training demanded that I act to effect change, but I had neither the ideas nor the skills nor the emotional strength to do any of it. In the end, all I did was hang around with Monny when I could, charmed by her humour and her pathos, appalled that a life could be lived this way. Honestly, I think our professional contact gained her nothing. If the purpose was to change Monny, it didn’t work.

One very hot afternoon, Monny turned up at the office, ill, drunk and agitated. Had she remained on the streets, she would have been picked up by the police and put in the watch-house. So we began to walk two long city blocks to the drying-out centre. Every time a police car drove by – and there were many, for we were near the police headquarters – Monny abused them loud and long. Fearing retribution, I tried to calm and quieten her. But she was fuelled for a fight and wanted to make an impact.

A crowd waiting for the peak hour buses watched the rowdy duet advancing. Many people permitted themselves to stare. Monny stopped and inspected the group. Their curiosity was not lost on her. I could only stand there, waiting for the abuse and rebuke from a clean-living, racist crowd.

‘How dare you fucking stare at this woman just because she is like that? She is a good woman and I know her.’ Monny addressed them in a practised, provocative voice,arms raised importunately.

Then, in the silence that followed, we continued into the sun, towards the respite of a few alcohol-free hours. It was on that street, almost where the Speech of Commendation was delivered to the commuters, that Monny died. That woman never knew how my devotion to her grew from that time on. I who promised much and delivered little was spoken for by her, the discarded woman, who with the intuition of one accustomed to rebuke knew how to defend with fire and, yes, dignity.

By contrast, Michel de Montaigne was of noble birth, educated in Latin and Greek under the direction of a humanist father, generally of good health (‘entire’, as he puts it) and widely recognised by the leaders of sixteenth-century France. This recognition included being awarded the Collar of the Order of St Michael, the highest order for French nobility. He seems an unlikely interlocutor for someone like me. In his day I would not have survived. But let’s imagine for a moment that I did live then with the same deformity I now possess. Aristotle would have seen in me the unhappy person, deprived of all external goods to ensure my happiness and possibly virtueless as I sought a way to get through the day.

At best, Montaigne would have seen in me a tantalising partner; at worst, someone worthy of condescension and pity. Our fates could not have been more divergent. A crippled woman would never have dared to speak of these serious matters with a powerful, intact man (sex is clearly another matter altogether). Yet Montaigne endured the losses of his closest friend and five of his six daughters. At thirty-eight, he withdrew from public life to write his essays. Seeking only the stimulus and consolations of his many books, he struggled with the sure knowledge that he was sad, that he knew little and that what he knew was of uncertain value, quipping at one point that, ‘Not being able to govern events, I govern myself’. It is with this sentiment that Montaigne finally persuades me of the clearest and best path.

‘I who promised much and delivered little was spoken for by her, the discarded woman, who with the intuition of one accustomed to rebuke knew how to defend with fire and, yes, dignity’

Being of wonderful profile is oddly potent. I do not pass anonymously. In places like the university where I work, many people claim to know me even though they have not met me. They know me because they have seen me and, flying to causes and meaning, have worked out things about me. It is a perversely powerful position to hold, like wearing the Collar of St Michael. I wear the collar of obvious deformity. Perhaps I too cannot govern the smallest of events and, believing that I can only govern myself, I am tempted to retreat to my family, my home and my books. The real challenge is to take the power and use it well for serious purpose. In these ways I can satisfy my quest for public and private authenticity.

In this I must face the impression that the more I explore deformity – others’ and my own – the less I understand myself. Years of being stared at have taught me that the moment of uncertainty – of grasping for civil straws that fail us, of trying to remember what our grandmother told us to do when faced with unsettling things – is not a moment for self-abnegation or for vengeful fantasy. It is at best an opportunity for kindness. When I gawk at my oddness in a shop window or the mirror, I need to be kind, for I face my own oddness and fragility. When I see that same gawking in a stranger, I need to be kind, because they too face fragility and loss. This is not a moment of distance, but of groping for understanding, of solidarity and of unity. Surely this is what it means to be wonderful. Surely this is a description of mutual wonderment.

Montaigne’s voice reminds me from the roots of Renaissance humanism (curiously so contemporary) to perceive that, in wonderment, even though it seems that my oddness drives the reactions of unwise strangers, I do not have access to their experience, their dreams or their fears. I cannot sum up this person as they would sum me up. It is the same folly for me to think that I understand the starer’s losses as it is for them to assume that they can discern what is important to know about me. The interaction of wonderment is not clarifying: it is opaque, and the more we gaze, the more opaque it becomes. These moments of swinging on the edge of the precipice of wonderment, of enquiry, of openness, of trying to face the thing and not fly to meaning, are not crystal moments. They are moments when our sureness is lost, illumination is dimmed, our fix on reality darkened, and mystery reasserted.

Mutual wonderment relies on suspending my own repressive rationality and entering the social intensity of a staring moment, of recognising in my starer a person of wonderful profile. I can govern my own reactions, stay with the gaze, not look away in shame, but also seek a mutual recognition – poignant and potent. I no longer attempt to understand the motivation of my starer, but to share in the discomfort and delight of a fractured anonymity, where in peculiar ways we become fleetingly naked to each other, stripped of some aspects of Emily Post’s civil pretences; where we jointly confront Montaigne’s truth of the thing – in this case, the fragility of our biological selves. And here, because of my long association with the idea, I can offer a degree of reassurance.

The Adelaide Central Market on Saturday morning is fertile ground for moments of mutual staring. In our civvy attire we are equal, stripped of the sartorial pretensions of the workday week. Recently, head down, weaving my way through a mobile crowd in search of my favourite pork bun, I found myself captivated by the ugliest, most painful-looking feet I had ever had the misfortune to observe. I thought, ‘Thank God I don’t have to get around on those’. As I picked my way through the crowd, these toes, black, gnarled and disfigured, came closer and closer until they stopped dead in front of me. I looked up into the eyes of a woman perhaps twenty-five years my senior. She said, ‘I am sorry this happened to you, but I think you are beautiful’. I looked into her eyes for a long time and said nothing other than ‘thank you’.

Have I been caught up in encounters tinged with mysterium tremendum et fascinans? In a simple everyday sort of way, I think so. The yuck-factor is palpable, yet the fascination is quietly comforting. Transforming moments? Yes, again. I have rediscovered that in stigma lies survival, that in ugliness lies beauty, that a woman with gross, gangrenous feet is kind and that I need not feel bad about the way that she recognised in me a fellow who shares the anguish of being not normal.

Is it translatable to those without obvious or spectacular oddness? I am not sure, but this I can assert: those without obvious deformity do not lack the pain that seems to accompany all. That suffering is apparent if you take the time to look into the eyes of the other or to feel their breath upon your cheek. If nothing else, Montaigne’s losses tell us that. I am prepared to risk the rejection of the gang of lads, reminded that goddesses do not wait in lift foyers and that they too will be knocked back. I am prepared to risk the turning aside of prattling prelates afraid of their own irrelevance. I am prepared to stand exposed in front of a curious crowd. I am willing to be considered virtuous or to be taken for a sex goddess, if this means that I open myself to moments when I can return the gaze of a stranger with enquiry and kindness.

To Garland-Thomson I want to say, ‘Thanks for making me think about the power in a stareable body’; to Goffman and Co., ‘I have discovered the troubling beauty of mutual wonderment. I have forsaken being a staree. I have become a respondent starer’; to Montaigne and Brontë: ‘Thanks for showing it as an alternative, but withdrawal (with or without a scorpion) is not a lasting option for me’; to Aristotle: ‘Happiness is born in connection to others, not just in beauty’; to Homer: ‘I agree that, though in my mutilation, much was taken, so much more remains and even more has been given’; and, finally, to P.G. Wodehouse: ‘Thanks for sending up a serious purpose. I need that most of all.’

Perhaps this is why Bertie couldn’t contemplate a life with Honoria: her gaze was too direct for a man dedicated to minor dramas on an illusory (though amusing) stage. Perhaps Goffman and Co. would conclude that I have simply found another script by which to live. Perhaps this is what Aristotle saw as a virtue in the service of happiness? Or perhaps this is what Montaigne meant when he said that there is more pleasure to be found in a woman whose body is not straight.

She does not look away.

Endnotes

1 P.G. Wodehouse, ‘Jeeves Takes Charge’, Saturday Evening Post, 1916.

2 Rose-Marie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look, OUP, 2009.

3 Michel de Montaigne, ‘Of Cripples’, trans. Charles Cotton, 1877. Online at http://www.aber.ac.uk/~jmcwww/Montaigne/essay105.html.

4 Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey, OUP, 1958.

5 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, Penguin, 1959.

6 Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, W.S. Williams, 1849.

7 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethic, Book 1, Section 8, trans. W.D. Ross.

Lorna Hallahan – who prefers poetry, music and sharing meals to the staircase, treadmill or playing field – is a social worker and theologian working as an academic in the School of Social and Policy Studies at Flinders University. She is a contributor to national and state disability policy debates who also writes and speaks regularly on ethics in human and health services.

Colin McLaren has already published two books drawing on his own remarkable experiences as an undercover policeman – On the Run (2009) and Infiltration: The True Story of the Man Who Cracked the Mafia (2009) – the former a work of fiction, the other autobiographical. In this latest work he merges the two forms to create a biographical novel of his beloved grandfather George Bingham, who, with a few mates, was among the first to enlist, in an Anzac battalion filled from rural Victoria within a fortnight of war being declared.

These soldiers covered themselves with glory, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. They were in the second wave at Gallipoli, and in the thick of the major battles in Europe. The point of McLaren’s novel, which is not quite the same thing as George Bingham’s story, is to recount the endurance of the original diggers and their loyalty to each other – and beyond that, to tell us about George, the ‘Sunflower’ of the title.

Two Bob’s Worth

Lorna Hallahan and David Hansen are the joint winners of the 2010 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay, the fourth to be presented by ABR, in association with Copyright Agency Limited’s Cultural Fund. The judges – critic James Ley and ABR Editor Peter Rose – chose from almost 200 entries. Both essays appear in this issue. We list the other shortlisted essays on page 29 and congratulate all the essayists.

David Hansen is no stranger to Calibre. His essay ‘Death Dance’ was commended in the inaugural prize, in 2007. In ‘Seeing Truganini’, he has forthright things to say about the recent abortive sale of Benjamin Law’s busts of Truganini and Woureddy, and about the controversy surrounding the promulgation of historical artefacts. Dr Hansen deplores the stigma surrounding such works, and is critical of academic and curatorial timidity and silence.

Kate Veitch’s first novel, Listen (2006), was a richly detailed examination of family and the repercussions of a single, fateful decision. Her second, Trust, continues her exploration of these themes and also focuses on feminism, forgiveness, religion, sexuality and the importance of recognising the truth about one’s own character and motivations. Divided into two sections (‘Before’ and ‘After’), the new novel follows the lives of Susanna Greenfield and her family in the lead up to, and aftermath of, an unexpected and tragic event.

Susanna, an art teacher who is desperately seeking inspiration for a career-saving exhibition, wrestles with the demands and opportunities of the digital revolution. Her husband, Gerry, is a handsome, successful and egotistical architect who specialises in ‘connective interstitial envelopment’. They live in Melbourne with their two teenage children: Seb, a talented tennis player, and Stella-Jean, who has business acumen and a keen interest in fashion. Susanna enjoys close relationships with her mother, Jean, and her younger sister Angie. A lonely single mother with a young son, Finn, Angie is seeking a sense of meaning and belonging through the Faith Rise church.

During 2007 I became enamoured of podcasting. The Canadian Broadcasting Commission’s Big Ideas and Elaine Wachtel’s Writers and Company were among my favourite programs and I would podcast these each week, irrespective of the topic or the interviewee. Thus I heard Alberto Manguel’s CBC Massey Lectures, a series of five wonderful presentations collectively titled ‘The City of Words’. It was not simply the content of these lectures; Manguel’s delivery is lyrical, intimate, andante and almost shockingly seductive. These lectures worked on me as reading does, drawing me in and then spinning me out to numerous other readings. Some of the books prompted by the lectures were rereadings, such as Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz and Borges’s stories others were new to me, and some, including Gilgamesh, had long been on my must-read list. Manguel provided the necessary nudge.

Clive Hamilton’s meticulously researched book Requiem for a Species is to climate change what Jonathan Schell’s book The Fate of the Earth (1982) was to the nuclear menace: an advance eulogy for the human race, not for the faint-hearted. Hamilton’s predicament is captured in the opening statement: ‘sometimes facing up to the truth is just too hard.’ Yet there is a solution, the author states: ‘We don’t have to take it lying down ... Only by acting, and acting ethically, can we redeem our humanity.’

Hamilton embarks on a grand tour of the issue, including a succinct summary of the scientific realities on which the rest of the book hinges, in the chapter titled ‘No Escaping the Science’. Here, the author exposes some of the prevailing myths regarding the consequences of ‘acceptable’ carbon dioxide emission rates and temperature targets, climate ‘stabilisation’ and the feasibility of effective adaptation. Numbers which grossly underestimate the effects of official carbon dioxide target levels, or of two- or three-degree Celsius rises in temperatures, have been plucked out of the air, often by economists, with minimal or no consultation with scientists. Yet current climate change trajectories exceed these parameters.

Chinese poetry has long been lost in translation. You only have to look at a line in an ancient Chinese poem and its inscrutability is plain to see: four or five characters across the page, each with several venerable meanings and without markers of tense, speaker, conjunctions or prepositions. Every translator becomes an adventurer, one who can only haul the poem onto the shores of difference.

The loss is greater when the sonic properties of the characters are taken into account – something Ezra Pound realised astonishingly late in life, after his youthful love affair with the characters as pictures. The rhyme and metre of the ancient poems, with their complex parallelisms of tone, place them closer to a music no European language can render. Even the best translators know what is often forgotten: the poem they have made must be as silent, on the Chinese scale of experience, as a dead albatross.

Nineteen Seventysomething is the second of the Long Story Shorts collections published by Affirm Press. It is a series of linked stories by author, journalist and music critic Barry Divola, set in the fictional Australian town of Braithwaite, in the 1970s, and told from the perspective of an adolescent boy, Charlie.

A Norwegian giant stands astride the deck of a whaling ship trapped in the Arctic ice, watching the other vessels in the fleet burn. Axe in hand, he patiently awaits the arrival of some disgruntled Eskimos, whom he expects to have to fight. Plagued by visions of a lost love, the Norseman commits the tale of his violent life to paper. One hundred and forty years later, a gaunt, dishevelled man climbs into Farrell’s taxi. He carries with him a box containing an ancient woman’s head, a dildo carved from whalebone and the journal of Ole Olavssen, the Norseman. The decrepit man, Bob Kilmartin, instructs Farrell to drive. Despite having just been beaten up by a transvestite colleague on Collins Street, Farrell obliges, desperate for the fare.

       ‘It’s something like learning geography,’ thought
       Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able
       to see a little further.
                   Through the Looking-Glass

Our mob was fond of Tweedledee
Because it was cutely seen
That he would rustle up the tribes
And thump the old Red Queen.

Do not be misled by the ‘Childhood Memories’ of the subtitle. Self-indulgent nostalgia is nowhere to be found in this book, which is a richly novelistic saga of a war-time family in Britain. It is Rodney Hall’s genius that his story evokes strong personal memories in the mind of the reader: in my case of a North Queensland childhood during the 1950s, punctuated by destructive cyclones and deadly marine stingers, rather than by German air raids. To read this book is a double pleasure: we enter both the world of young Rod and our own childhood at the same time.

In common with many wartime childhoods, Hall (or ‘Rod’) was profoundly affected by the absence of a father, though in his case this was also a cause for shame, as his father died before the war began. This paternal absence is a significant feature of several other notable Australian autobiographies, and autobiographical novels, including those of Barbara Hanrahan, Unreliable Memoirs (1980) by Clive James, and Life Rarely Tells (1958) by Jack Lindsay, who lost touch with his father, Norman, for a number of years.

The cover-blurb is a genre all its own. No sensible publisher would grace the cover of a book with the assertion, ‘This is a pile of crap’, even if it is. So we should all take a blurb cum granum salis. The blurb for John Dale’s Leaving Suzie Pye reads: ‘Rips along with verve and confidence … funny, energetic and full of life.’ The signatory is Helen Garner. Can this be the same Helen Garner who gave us The Children’s Bach and The First Stone, I asked myself, as I persevered with Dale’s lacklustre novel. What significant omissions are concealed behind those three periods in her remark?

A generation of Australian schoolchildren knows Peter Skrzynecki’s poetry. The simple, direct language of Immigrant Chronicle (1975) speaks of both the desolation and optimism of the postwar migrant. Boys of Summer, Skrzynecki’s third venture into book-length fiction, treads similar thematic terrain.

The Krupas are Polish Catholics displaced by the war. By the 1950s they have settled in an outer suburb of Sydney, grateful to live in a peaceful country, content with their outer suburban home and menial jobs, but ambitious enough for their only child, Tom. An ordinary boy, Tom gets into mischief, but doesn’t trouble his parents much. He has a group of friends who attend the same Catholic primary school. Together they climb trees and frighten the local birds with their shanghais. They are not all as lucky as Tom. Barry is crippled by polio and his father drinks too much, but his sister fascinates Tom with her Hollywood good looks and come-hither manner.

Creative Lives presents short biographical essays on twenty-two Australian writers (two of whom are also notable artists); but it is just as much a book about the value and purpose of the National Library of Australia’s Manuscripts Collection. Ironically, the book offers little documentation of the process by which it came to be written. Hanley does tell us, however, that she ‘was asked to write a book on twenty of the writers whose papers are held in the Manuscripts Collection’ and eventually chose twenty-two.

What an interesting string of choices. The National Library’s strategy to promote its collections through publishing projects; the selection of a topic, and a number, for this particular project; the choice of Hanley as the writer; Hanley’s selection of writers to write about, and of specific incidents and documents; and behind all this, the National Library’s collection building, not least the key decisions articulated in its Manuscripts Collection Policy, which prioritises ‘documents that have definite research or exhibition value’, ‘individuals or families ... of national standing and influence’, and ‘organisations ... with broad functions, activities and influence’.

The first volume of  T.S. Eliot’s letters, published in 1988, covered his early life to the end of literary modernism’s annus mirabilis, 1922. The year was a turning point in the thirty-four-year-old Eliot’s career. In November he published the poem that made him famous, ‘The Waste Land’, in the inaugural edition of Criterion, the journal he was to edit until 1939.

That it has taken twenty-two years for the second volume to appear makes two of its features immediately noteworthy. The first is that this is a substantial addition to the readily available primary material about Eliot’s life and work, made all the more welcome by the fact that his estate has, at times, been prickly about making such material accessible. The second is that this long-awaited doorstop only covers three years of Eliot’s life. At this rate, we can look forward to the fifteenth and final volume of correspondence sometime around the end of the twenty-third century. We are still two years shy of Eliot’s religious conversion in 1927; eight years from the breakdown of his first marriage and his disgraceful public comments about ‘free-thinking Jews’; and more than two decades away from his Nobel Prize for Literature. Ahead lies such significant poetry as ‘Ash Wednesday’(1930) and ‘Four Quartets’ (1935–42).

The key theme of Overland 198 is upheaval. The contributors explore a range of dramatic changes that have occurred in Australian politics and global culture in recent years. Mungo McCallum contends that asylum seekers have been used as political footballs by both Labor and the Liberals. Raewyn Connell investigates how the left has been affected by what she terms the ‘neoliberal agenda’. Michael Brull responds to a recent debate between ‘dissident Jews’ Dennis Altman and Ned Curthoys. James Ley describes the work of up-and-coming Australian novelists, and there is short fiction by Miriam Sved, Phillip Tang and Tim Richards.

It is strangely affecting to see people’s lips moving as they sit silently reading to themselves. Apparently, when we read we can’t help but imagine speaking. Even silent reading has its life in the body: seeing words, the part of our brain that governs speech starts working. When we read poetry silently to ourselves, is it our own voice or the poet’s voice that we hear?

Alone, we do not think in prose, but through an associative sequence of perceptions, images, memories and desires. For that reason poetry, which renews itself with each new line, probably comes closest to the structure of thought. Reading poetry, we take it over as though speaking to ourselves – only with a new lucidity and range. But when we hear a poet reading, the poem is repossessed. It becomes social; and can make us feel that we are hearing in society the language of our inwardness.

Mid-career reinvention is an exciting thing. Ken Bolton’s poem ‘Outdoor Pig-Keeping, 1954 & My Other Books on Farming Pigs’, in Black Inc.’s The Best Australian Poems 2009, was the most surprising poem in the book. Where were the friends, artists and cafés? Where were the small ironies? A larger irony was at work. Bolton’s new book, The Circus, is something else again: a wry, sly and affectionate long poem nothing like Frank O’Hara – generally seen as Bolton’s guiding influence – and not much like Bolton’s Australian peers either. While much of Bolton’s poetry relies on a bemused first-person narration, relentlessly questioning what a poem or even a thought can do, The Circus is narrated in a shifting third person. It makes quite a difference.

Why do you write?

To stop time, to figure it all out.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. And prone to sleep talking and singing and, absurdly, trumpet fanfares. As a child I had a recurring dream of flying crocodiles, concluding with the subtitle ‘Christian Television Association’.

Mike heaves the window down to slam it shut, and Di comes running across the carpet just in time to see the whole town change into black chimneys and glass flashes and this one WOW! comes so close i duck and the windows rattle and i see weird rooms over there like bright toilets and rooms with cupboards and enormous shadows flicker on the wallpaper, but im not afraid because Mikes here and im going to be a sailor anyway! and a puff of smoke drifts past in front of everything but i press my nose against the mesh,

In the latest edition of Quarterly Essay, entitled What’s Right?, Monash University academic Waleed Aly argues that right-wing politics has lost its way in the twenty-first century. Aly’s engaging and sophisticated analysis will appeal to readers from around the political spectrum.    Aly begins by arguing that the terms ‘Left and Right are the hallmark of a political conversation that is obsessed with teams …’ Such a ‘conversation’ is unhelpful, for many reasons. ‘Team Right’ is hardly homogeneous, and many of its members have, in recent decades, abandoned traditional conservatism. Aly supports this point by citing the Bush administration’s distinctly ‘un-conservative’ decision to invade Iraq, and the implementation of the controversial WorkChoices laws by John Howard’s government. Aly contends that such endeavours are by-products of neo-conservatism and neo-liberalism.

It is unusual for a political leader to figure in the demonology of both the left and the right. Malcolm Fraser bears that distinction. For Labor he was the arrogant Western District squire, trampling on the rights of the workers; the hardline Cold War warrior and the abuser of the constitution. For Liberals he was the leader who denied them their Thatcherite moment in the sun and who, embittered by early retirement, decried their principles and their hero, John Howard. These memoirs are, above all, Fraser’s repudiation of these mythologies. The book is a strange hybrid, Fraser’s response being mediated by the journalist and writer Margaret Simons into a third-person narrative. In modern times, only Charles de Gaulle has dared such effrontery.

A shocking moment for those of leftist persuasion in the Australia of the late twentieth century came in the early hours of 6 March 1983. The hint of a tear on that Easter Island visage, a tremble in that pugnacious jaw: could Malcolm Fraser be human after all? Could this be the hard man from Nareen who preached and practised a rugged individualism – ‘life was not meant to be easy’ – to the poor and downtrodden? Could this be the warmonger, defender and administrator of the Vietnamese intervention? Above all, was this the evil conspirator who, in league with the vice-regal fiend, brought down the beloved Gough, smashing him in successive general elections and driving him from parliament, if not from politics?

Not really? Tom Mackee? That boorish, pervy, smart-mouthed Year Eleven boy from Saving Francesca (2004), who offended Tara Finke whenever he opened his mouth, is the central character in Melina Marchetta’s new book. At least he loved music and was not a bad guitarist. Last time we met him, Tom became part of Francesca’s circle at school. Occasionally charming, a dab hand at witty repartee, he was falling for activist and feminist Tara Finke. Now he’s not sixteen anymore, but twenty-one (or thereabouts).

In 1914 men left for war expectant of a great adventure,’ Winifred Weir writes in the introduction to her poetry collection. ‘So many died. So many returned haunted, silent, desperate with what they had seen and endured.’ Walking on Ashes is Weir’s attempt to understand the effects of war on her family; her father and brother fought in World War I and World War II, respectively. The book, loosely chronological, contains dates of battles and their locations (‘Gallipoli’, ‘Passchendaele 1917’, ‘Amiens, France, 1918’). Some poems are out of order, suggesting that the sequence of events is less important than their overall consequence. In Walking on Ashes, time – like Weir’s father’s right arm – is shattered by war. The point of view is fluid, too: it shifts between father, mother, daughter, and son, as each has an experience to relate.

Always an afterthought, last thing left
in that mad dash to spit and polish
before visitors – rare here, so I forget
how others might read you if they looked up:
weird residue of disuse, proof of slackness, antisocial.

The dreamy-eyed young girl from Peter Weir’s film Picnic at Hanging Rock, whose image adorns the cover of this anthology, gives a misleading impression of the ‘Australian girl’ who features in most of the stories. This girl may be the central figure in the colonial romance genre, as the editors propose, but she is characterised by energy and independence, rather than by the kind of sexually charged haze that surrounds the girls in the 1975 film. For the most part, her romantic experiences lead straight to marriage, give or take the odd misunderstanding along the way, and marriage was an institution entangled in economic security, social stability and, ultimately, the national destiny of white settler Australia. The Australian girl of the period was of necessity a clear-eyed realist where marriage was concerned. ‘Lorna Travis; A Christmas Story’ makes the economics of marriage very clear, while in Ada Cambridge’s ‘A Sweet Day’, an English aristocrat in disguise falls for a capable colonial girl and rewards her with a title as well as a wedding ring.

House of Hits is an historical account of the family whose company helped change Australian music. The book is written by Jane Albert, a former journalist who, while wanting to respect her family’s ‘privacy’, nonetheless felt the Australian public was owed ‘some insight into the people who created such an inspiring business’.

‘Posterity is so dainty,’ complained the American essayist John Jay Chapman, ‘that it lives on nothing but choice morsels.’ Chapman was writing about Browning, whose work for his contemporaries meant life, not art. But, Chapman predicts, ‘Posterity will want only art’. It is a nice distinction when considering our penchant for anthologies. This daintiness goes all the way back to the first anthology, Meleager’s in ancient Greece, as the word itself means ‘flower gathering’, or simply a ‘garland’ or ‘bouquet’. We pick poems like flowers and arrange them in a book. The suggestion, of course, is that certain kinds of poems tend to get left out in favour of those that work best as stand-alone ornaments, giving us an unnatural notion of what’s actually out there growing in the fields.

It is thirty-six years since the Australian National University Press published Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years; thirty-five since the unassuming Penguin paperback that became both a loved and critically acclaimed bestseller. Now Melbourne University Publishing has produced a deluxe, large-format, sombrely and evocatively illustrated edition. On the front cover is a Frank Hurley photograph of Australian troops crossing on duckboards a flooded field near the Menin Road in late October 1917. In the background stand stripped, gaunt, sentinel trees. Flip to the back cover and the image is of ‘A Young South Australian Patriot in 1916’. A cherub in uniform, he holds a toy rifle, in earnest for a conflict that, blessedly, will end before it is his turn to go.

Late in 1944 Richard Turner was at last able to come home. A Sydney taxi driver, he had been captured in Greece in June 1941. Like 2,000 other Australians, he missed the last boats to leave. Though captured by the Germans, he soon escaped to join the andartes – partisans fighting the Germans in Greece’s rugged interior. With the Germans pulling out, British officers managed to contact Richard and he was finally able to leave for home after nearly five years. On 17 December 1944 the lorry taking Richard to Athens airport accidentally drove into one of the first firefights of the Greek civil war. Richard now lies in the beautiful war cemetery at Phalereon, an oasis of peace amid the traffic that chokes Athens.

Richard Turner’s story is emblematic of this aggravating but ultimately worthwhile book. Richard was captured in the lost battle for Greece, lived among Greek people for three years, and remains among them still, arguably lost to memory in the land he last saw when his troopship steamed out of Sydney Harbour in January 1940.

The first attempt to settle Western Australia, in 1827, failed. This book brings home that the second attempt, in 1829, was also very fragile and could well have failed. By 1850 there were still only 5900 non-Aboriginal people in the colony. By any measure, this was well short of the critical mass of population needed to sustain development in such a remote and vast outpost.

The expectations of the first British settlers were unrealistic. Promised large land grants beyond their wildest imaginings back in Britain, they brought with them indentured servants to work the land. They had been assured that there were extensive plains ‘ready for the ploughshare’, but usually the land actually needed clearing first. The capital and time thus required to start making a profitable return meant that some of the biggest landowners looked for ways to release their servants. This relieved them of the obligation to support them. These abandoned servants became the first wave of paupers in the colony. The poor and destitute soon began to multiply: women whom their menfolk could not or would not support; children and orphans; the mad; the disabled; habitual drunkards.

This is an important book that should be read by as wide a range of historians as possible. Some will find it totally agreeable, others will find it very disagreeable, while others will agree with some parts of the book but not all. It is a book not just about the ‘militarisation of Australian history’, but, perhaps more importantly, about how Australians see themselves in the world.

The arguments put forward by these distinguished scholars, who collectively and individually have done so much to advance Australian history in many diverse ways, are as follows. Looking at Australian history in its entirety reveals that it is replete with issues of major importance. Here are just a few of them. Why did a frontier society such as Australia lead the world in giving votes to women? To what extent did the experiences of our first hundred years prove important in forming the Australian character? Why did we develop, so early, unique institutions such as the arbitration commission? The authors argue that in recent years these and other themes have been neglected in favour of military topics, to the extent that our history seems to jump from the South African veldt to Gallipoli to the Western Front to New Guinea to Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, with nothing apparently seen to be worthy of note in between.

There are three ways to read this delightful book. The first – your reviewer’s method – is to romp through it picking places to linger and relish. The second way is to take a few months off and study every page, taking notes. Students and specialists will do this and be rewarded. The third way is to have it handy on the shelf to return to when a topic turns up needing clarification.

James Franklin has written a primer on the philosophy of science and epistemology. He visits all the usual heroes and villains, plus a few unexpected ones: I would not have predicted a role for Yes, Minister in this kind of guide, but it is full of such deft diversions. It also has a succession of ‘breakouts’ and standalone quotations.

Is the exercise of judgment the reason for a book review? I hate the idea of that. I would rather experiment with the genre by asking if it can add something to the book, like a mole or a prosthesis. In the process, could one also say something about how the book works, as it moves through its various environments, collecting other growths? I think John Kinsella would appreciate this eco-critical move, for what it ultimately wants to interrogate is the way the book sustains its life. And then, having confessed to that vitalist position, may I go on to ask what the book has to say about Life? Why not tackle the big issue, the writer’s vision?

One would not call a book Post-colonial without wishing to engage that body of theoretical literature that still remains strong in the academy. Post-colonial studies always sourced its energy from two types of critique: from the political, because that drove various anti-imperialist independence movements; and from the literary, because the new nationalisms and identities emerging post-independence were, and remain, vitally negotiated in literary experimentation. The composers of stories were also builders of new nations, and vice versa. Kinsella’s post-colonial writing, if anything, deconstructs Australian national identity in a writing composed in fragments. It is composed, in fits and starts, on and about a fragment of Australia (the Cocos-Keeling islands) way off that Western Australian coast about which he so often writes.

Martin Westley takes a walk one day and accidentally triggers a series of events, transforming the walk into a tragicomic life-changing expedition. While strolling along the coastal path between the beaches at Bronte and Clovelly, Martin is struck on the temple and loses consciousness. On waking he gradually realises that he doesn’t know his name, has lost his memories and has no idea who he is. He meets his wife, Alex, who is indifferent to, indeed contemptuous of, him and just as mysterious as before to Martin. The family home is unnervingly free of any intimate traces of his existence. His son ignores him. Only his daughter Emily shows any concern for his well-being.