About ten years ago I was interviewed on Irish radio on a matter entirely unconnected with writing. The first question the interviewer asked me was, ‘Is that yourself, Elisabeth?’ This ungrammatical question struck me as both hilarious and pertinent. I don’t remember much about the interview except that leading question.

‘Is that yourself?’ In 1959 the sociologist Erving Goffman wrote a famous book called Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life. Goffman hypothesised that we are all actors on the stage of our own lives, that we present convenient and expedient personae according to the occasion. In hindsight Goffman’s proposition seems obvious, but in 1959 this was groundbreaking stuff, with particular relevance beyond sociological interpretation to the dramaturgical. Indeed, Goffman explained his thesis using the theatre as a model. He proposed that everyday life is a staged performance. Thus, the front of house is where the public performance of our lives is managed. Backstage contains the parts of our lives that are inaccessible to a wider audience. Yet, it is backstage where the most interesting things happen.   I come from a background in the social sciences. To me, the act of narrating a memoir is a front-of-stage performance and memory, the handmaid of memoirs, is dragged out from backstage as a supporting cast. However, as any social scientist will attest, memory is the most unreliable component of the psyche.

‘In telling the story of my ancestors, my attempt at the memoir genre proved self-defeating and creatively stultifying’

In telling the story of my ancestors, my attempt at the memoir genre proved self-defeating and creatively stultifying. Rather than helping me to explain why I had gone missing from my own life for the best part of thirty years, I found that I was disappearing into a fault-line between what I wanted to reveal and what needed to be kept hidden. The final result was a front of stage performance. The curtains to the area backstage, which should waft enticingly, were tightly closed.

This is not unlike the dilemma that Günter Grass explored in his purported memoir Peeling the Onion (2007). Grass’s decision to reveal that he was briefly (and ineptly) a member of the notorious Wafen SS at the end of World War II aroused such controversy that it derailed the important points he made about memoir: namely, the cohesion and dissonance between Dichtung und Wahrheit, fiction and truth; the way in which a backstage story can be told front of stage.

My full name is Elisabeth Miriam Esther de Rijke-Nassau. I am a medieval dinosaur. When I die, a DNA coiling back to Charlemagne will be declared extinct. In 2010 others who claim a more indirect descent from Charlemagne will gather in a place called Vianden, in Luxemburg, to celebrate one thousand years of identity as the Nassaus. Vianden, a castle in the air, was abandoned in the seventeenth century but reconstructed in the 1960s. It is where my ancestors first established their identities as warlords, dukes and princes. Now it is a tourist site.            

The Nassaus led the revolt of the Low Countries against the Spanish in a war that lasted the worst part of eighty years, ending in 1588. A century later, another Nassau, William of Oranje-Nassau, became king of England. At the Battle of the Boyne he defeated his father-in-law, James II, the last Catholic king of the English. Among William’s legacies was a divided Ireland and the wearing of the Orange in support of the Protestant cause.

The author's parents on their wedding day, 1935 (photograph courtesy of author)

I was born on a freezing day in January 1947 in a place called Middelburg, on the island of Walcheren, the most south-western province of the Netherlands. Middelburg, or Middelbroch as it was known in the Middle Ages, was founded in the twelfth century by Elisabeth Kunigunda, daughter of the king of Thuringia and wife of Wolfert of Nassau. My grandfather, who had many titles but preferred to be known as ‘The Lord of the Islands’, registered my birth the same day. As if he knew I would be the dynasty’s full stop, he added to my birth certificate the title ‘The Lady of the Islands’. The matter of titles is a minefield of arcane conundrums. Only someone born into the family can be known as the Lord of the Islands. As I come from an unbroken male line, there had never been a ‘Lady’ before.

A few days after my birth, I was decked out in eighteenth-century lace in preparation for my baptism. The tradition of the Calvinist sect I was born into dictates that one of the godparents should carry the child to church. My godfather, Prince Bernhard, the German-born son-in-law of Queen Wilhelmina – a war hero like my father, who was his close friend – emerged from my grandparents’ house, took one look at the snow and ice in the street and removed his army greatcoat. I was carried to my baptism wrapped in the same coat that Prince Bernhard had worn when he accepted the German surrender at Wageningen.

This story, this image, is so vividly imprinted on my psyche that I can feel the cold. I can visualise the streets, the wasteland of the dead city which had been consumed by the fire of blitzkrieg; then flooded and sunk in the liberation of the Netherlands. Logic suggests that it is impossible to remember one’s infant baptism. Nevertheless, the story exists, transported somehow to my memory banks.

On my second birthday I contracted rheumatic fever and nearly died. My mother had been badly affected by the war. She had spent two years in Dachau, betrayed by one of my father’s brothers. For long stretches of my childhood she disappeared into a sanatorium. My father, a dijkes engineer in charge of the reconstruction of our province, was of necessity absent for much of the time. For the next four years I was largely brought up by my father’s aristocratic parents, who had given three sons to the war, and by my mother’s parents, who were illiterate Jews and from whom my paternal grandmother, looking for servants, had virtually abducted my mother when she was ten. These four people, from such different backgrounds, gave me the greatest gift – unconditional love. To them, the sole child to be born after the war, the only survivor of both families, I was the centre of their fractured universe.

In 1953, on another bitterly cold January day, a great storm surge in the Atlantic produced the highest tides in living memory. At midnight the dijkes around our island, which had been deliberately destroyed by the Allies and the Resistance in 1944, and which had been badly mended after the war, could not withstand the force of the sea. Eighteen hundred people died that night, thousands more in the following months, of pneumonia, influenza and heartbreak. Among them were my grandfather, the ‘The Lord of the Islands’ and my grandmother, François, his ‘Lady’.

I remember that night in 1953; the profound silence before the dijkes of Zeeland broke one by one lives as strongly in my brain as the memory of being carried to my baptism by Prince Bernhard. These two memories survive as indistinguishable entities within my psyche. Yet one of those memories is a psychological impossibility.

By 1955 my father was a disgraced and bitter man. He blamed the government for neglecting the rebuilding of the dijkes. He lost the patronage of the royal family and, most importantly, his friendship with Prince Bernhard. Over the next few years he rented all of our properties and arranged a two-year exile for us in a place he called ‘New Holland’. He would never call Australia home.

‘There is a narrative arc in Australian migrant stories which prefers you to arrive penniless, make a success of your life and refer to yourself ever after as a proud and grateful Aussie’

There is a narrative arc in Australian migrant stories which prefers you to arrive penniless, make a success of your life and refer to yourself ever after as a proud and grateful Aussie. My parents and I arrived with a shipload of possessions, a suitcase full of titles and enough money to buy a fairly grand house in an upper-class Melbourne suburb. Less than two years later, my father was dead and my mother and I had an unpleasant encounter with poverty.

In 1975 my mother was killed in a car accident. I was the driver of the car and walked away physically unscathed. The memory of that dreadful moment of impact, the severing of my mother’s life, is one that can never be dislodged.Two years later, I married and became Elisabeth Holdsworth, effectively erasing my previous life. I researched my family from time to time, particularly when I was stationed at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. I rarely spoke about my family. Although I was physically close to the Netherlands, I avoided going there. When I returned to Middelburg in 2005, it was the first time I had been there since 1959.

In my professional life I was required to be discreet. Closing the curtains firmly on anything going on backstage became habitual, perhaps pathological. My going missing from my own life suited me and my masters. And that is how it remained for the next three decades.

In 2005 I learnt that my aunt, my last blood relative, was dying in the Netherlands. Katrien, my father’s only sister, had been a lady-in-waiting to four queens: Emma, Wilhelmina, Juliana and the current monarch, Queen Beatrix. Katrien was sent to court in 1920, with every hope that she would attract the attention of an aristocrat and marry well. My family had considerable wealth from properties in Indonesia, and Katrien had a huge dowry. Yet she died in 2005, having never married. At court she had been handicapped on two counts: her mother was a member of the re-reformed Calvinist sect, frowned upon by the royal family; and there was a rumour that my paternal grandmother, Katrien’s mother, was part-Japanese.

Her name was François de Rijke. Her family may or may not have been related to my father’s. The story that came down to me was that her French-sounding first name, her dark eyes, her black hair (which my father and I inherited), were due to Huguenot ancestry. Her father was Johannis de Rijke, who lived in Japan from about 1873 to 1903. Johannis is known to the Japanese as the hero of Kiso for his work in the reclamation of the Kiso Delta near Nagoya. He was a secretary of state and close confidant to the Meiji emperor – the only Westerner to achieve this status in Japan.

Johannis returned to the Netherlands in 1903, having been decorated by the emperor of Japan and knighted by Queen Wilhelmina, yet when he died in Amsterdam in 1911 he was buried in an unmarked grave. According to her marriage papers, François was born in Nagoya in 1879. She did not exist as François before her marriage to my grandfather in 1899. I have no idea who her mother was or what her true given name was. I only know that when François married my grandfather the Meiji emperor gave her a ring, a heavy gold band with a large cornelian set in a coronet. The story I received was that Meiji gave this ring to François as a sign of respect to her father.

‘Is that yourself, Elisabeth?’ I hear my Irish interlocutor ask.

On the face of it I have material enough to write a memoir, maybe several. In another way, I don’t have nearly enough. Before abandoning the memoir process completely, I read many examples of the genre. To someone trained in the social sciences, Goffman and his theories on the presentation of the self had made too deep an impression for my writing to find a comfortable niche within the genre. I was torn back and forth. If I ditched the memoir process, how was I to write the stories entrusted to me?

J.M. Coetzee’s eponymous character Elizabeth Costello declares: ‘There must be some limit to the burden of remembering that we impose on our children and grandchildren. They will have a world of their own, of which we should be less and less part.’ Quite! But what if one is the full stop? Do I have a responsibility to history, to my ancestors, and who gives a damn anyway? Why not just close the curtains and shuffle off?

A bust of Johannis de Rijke (1847–1913) on the island of Walcheren (photograph by Elisabeth Holdsworth)

The decision to write in another way was ordained in Middelburg in 2007. It was made for me by my ancestors and by that uncomfortable companion of one’s life – the psyche. My husband and I were staying in an upstairs apartment of a narrow house in a street called the Joodengang, Jew’s Alley. The stairs to our rooms were no more than a ladder, which could only be negotiated backwards. At times during my life I have been afflicted by sleepwalking. I had spent days trying to write the memoir. It was proving so elusive that even a title refused to reveal itself. My nights had become peopled by horrible dreams of my ancestors rising out of their crypts with raised arms. One night my husband woke me as I was about to descend the ladder frontwards. Had I done so I might have been badly injured, or worse. My husband is a phlegmatic man, not given to outbursts. ‘Will you stop with that bloody memoir before you kill us both!’ he shouted.

I persisted a little longer, and found two apparent memoirs which proved useful.

Michael Ondaatje, in his memoir, Running in the Family(1982), makes the following comment, which sums up my dilemma: ‘Truth disappears with history and gossip tells us in the end nothing of personal relationships.’ In the acknowledgments, Ondaatje makes this extraordinary statement:

My family ... had to put up with compulsive questioning ... hearing again and again long lists of genealogies and rumour ... I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture’. And if those listed above disapprove of the fictional air I apologise and can only say that in Sri Lanka a well told lie is worth a thousand facts.

Ondaatje’s fictional air and gesture towards memoir is a work of art. My attempt at something similar was rubbish and quickly abandoned.

Günter Grass dubs memory the handmaid of memoir. In his view, very appealing to a social scientist, memory is subject to conflation, distortion, misperception, deception and ambition. In Peeling the Onion, Grass repeatedly shows how the stories arose out of real events, and illustrates how the lines became so blurred that he cannot say, or will not say, where truth deviates from fiction. The origins of The Tin Drum (1959), he says, lie in a postwar stonemason’s yard, the winding path to art, and the narrow track between literature and reality, Dichtung und Wahrheit.

Grass uses the metaphor of peeling an onion layer by layer to reveal the core of his memoir. But what is the core? Grass, also a graphic artist, provides the etchings in the book. The endpaper shows a closed onion, with a baby onion next to it – not, as one might expect, the fully flayed vegetable.

I read Peeling the Onion not as a memoir but as a commentary on the memoir genre, with its inherent complications such as omission, exaggeration and problematic memory. I absorbed two important lessons from Grass: a way of writing while treading that narrow path between Dichtung und Wahrheit; and another more important moral lesson. In the world I grew up in, the suffering of the German people in the immediate postwar period was a matter of indifference to us. Grass describes how his mother, who was not at all sympathetic to the Nazi régime (quite the opposite), was raped repeatedly by the Russian liberators who helped free the German people from themselves. Mrs Grass died of cancer five years before the publication of Tin Drum.

This I believe to be the true core of Grass’s work: to make us aware of that postwar period that the victors have chosen to ignore.

Grass and Ondaatje had something I did not possess: people – characters – from whom they could draw those small and large details of their lives. With the exception of my aunt, all the characters of my life had died decades ago. Time proved to be the final thief as I tried to write my memoir.

‘Is that yourself, Elisabeth?’ That medieval dinosaur searching for some evidence that we existed at all?

My mother was betrayed to the Nazis by my uncle. Had he revealed her Jewishness, not just the fact that she was the wife of a Resistance leader with a price on his head second only to that of Prince Bernhard, she would probably have died in the concentration camp. But she escaped, and after the liberation, amid the turmoil, my father executed my uncle for his treachery.

Despite everything, my mother was one of the wittiest people I have ever known. (Once, when a gauche boyfriend of mine asked her if she had been to university, she replied, ‘Yes, the University of Dachau’.) She was also immensely intelligent and brave. But violence was a part of her life too. As I was growing up, my mother wasn’t insane but she was consumed from time to time by a rage at the hand that fate had dealt her. She beat me, even when I was very ill. She struck me for the last time when I was sixteen. I was vacuuming at the time and she had just hit me across the back of the head. I lifted the end of the pipe and said to her, ‘If you ever hit me again, I will kill you’.

The castle of Vianden at Luxemburg (photograph by Elisabeth Holdsworth)

Fifteen minutes later I left the house, not to return for a year. I didn’t go very far. I moved in with a man who lived around the corner. He was a psychiatrist and homosexual. I am speaking of the mid-1960s. The word ‘gay’ was not in common use then, though other descriptors and attitudes were. My mother knew where I was. She, bless her, had an imperfect understanding of homosexuality and thought it meant that he was sterile, that I wasn’t therefore in danger of becoming pregnant. How right she was.

‘My mother and I were united in the belief that this damaged, haunted man deserved our unconditional affection’

I owe this psychiatrist my interest in human behaviour. For a year my mother and I talked through this man. She misunderstood the backstage aspects of homosexuality and frankly didn’t care. My mother and I were united in the belief that this damaged, haunted man deserved our unconditional affection. Gradually, after many travels, many adventures (none of which I am prepared to discuss at this time), we became close again. In my twenties we shared a flat in Melbourne. Mother declared that there be only one house rule – that whoever was there for breakfast was there and that was that. Needless to say, the friends were always hers, not mine.

I can never atone for the car accident which took my mother’s life, but I can try to make her live on the page. In fiction I can make sense of her rages at the many unfair throws of the dice. In fiction I can speak about my psychiatrist friend, who committed suicide in 1975, the same year my mother died. And through fiction I can examine my grandmother’s life and explore the forces that made her recreate herself into this persona, ‘François’, with her rigid adherence to the most fundamental tenets of Calvinism, presumably to conceal her Japanese past.

In 2010 this dinosaur, this relic of medieval riff-raff, will attend some fine parties in Luxemburg, at a castle in the clouds called Vianden. I will also host some grand affairs in a place called Middelburg, which has been rebuilt to an approximation of what it was before the war. That year, for what will probably be the last time, my home, Toorenvliedt, the fourth castle built on the same site since the twelfth century, will take centre stage. In 2010 I will probably be the only one to remember that it is also the centenary of my parents’ birth.

Both Vianden and Middelburg hold the myths, the rumours, the truths, the conflations, the erasures and all the rest of the baggage that surround my ancestors. My heart belongs in these places, yet they are both recreations of something they once were, or hoped to be. Vianden and Middelburg are as real as film sets. I would like to think that ultimate irony would appeal to that insightful sociologist, Erving Goffman.

Who is, or rather who was, André Gide? I ask this because a distinguished editor warned me, on hearing that I was about to review Robert Dessaix’s enticing new book, that nowadays nobody would remember who Gide was. Ah, the years, the years!

It was another story in the time of my youth. When I was playing out my student days, you couldn’t help knowing about Gide. He was part of the flavour of the time, like Woolf and Auden, Camus and Faulkner. When you were solemnly Kafking or Lorcing over coffee, he was part of the stuff of conversation. But in different ways: my closest undergraduate friend was absorbed by the lyrical Gide, by La porte étroite (1909) and La symphonie pastorale (1919), whereas I liked the hard modernism of Les caves du Vatican (1914) and Les faux-monnayeurs (1926), particularly the latter. Above all, I have been fascinated for decades by the very last sentence of that book: ‘I shall be curious to know Caloub.’ The proleptic Caloub has kept on haunting me, not least because this is such a cagey way to end a novel, looking forward to the New Wave filmmakers. After all, our appetites are not always satisfied by closure. As readers we can enjoy the sense of something still throbbing at our nerve-tips.

Another matter all this brings to mind is proper conduct with the titles of books that one has read translated into English: should we call this novel The Coiners, after all? Or even, to pick up John Hollander’s old point about the definite article, Coiners? Again, which titles are they that one feels like keeping in the parent language, rather than knowing them readily by their making over into our own tongue, Stendhal’s La Chartreuse de Parme (1839) mainly goes that way, for example, but not Camus’s The Outsider (L’étranger, 1942).

Too many of my friends are dead, and others wrecked
By various diseases of the intellect
Or failing body. How am I still upright?
And even I sleep half the day, cough half the night.

Part historical murder mystery, part journey towards reconciliation, at the heart of Amanda Curtin’s novel, The Sinkings, is a figure whom we barely meet but whose existence is the key to this remarkable narrative.

Set in Ireland, Scotland and Western Australia, The Sinkings tracks the life of Little Jock – lost child, survivor of the Potato Famine, convict and murder victim – through the eyes of amateur historian and library sleuth Willa Samson. Grieving and guilt-stricken, Willa has abandoned her profession as an editor and immersed herself in the past in a process of comprehension and discovery. As the story unfolds, Little Jock emerges as an intriguing subject for Willa’s historical navigation. Her impetus to gather evidence of Little Jock’s secret also arises from a deep need to understand the experience and perspective of her own lost child, Imogen.

In the opening pages of an early manuscript, ‘A Feast of Life’, Elizabeth Jolley ponders the question of whether a novel should have a message. She has no answer, but will write out of her ‘experiences and feelings’. If her writing does help anyone, then ‘let a message be found’, so that she might ‘feel that I am at least doing something in a wider sphere than the domestic routine within the walls of the little house’. Jolley goes on to describe her method: ‘I shall start in the early years of my life and try to make things take some sort of order but order is not a strong point with me and I shall write with all my heart so that there will be the noise of my children in these pages …’

This is the quotation that Brian Dibble chooses to open his biography of Elizabeth Jolley (1923–2007), and it evokes at once her meditative style and its experiential basis, as well as its celebrative quality. Her life was indeed a feast, though not always a palatable one. There is the desire, as urgent for her as the ambition to be a writer, to be of assistance to others, as well as a highly developed self-awareness. So much of Jolley’s non-fictional writing is similarly evocative and apparently revealing of her ‘experiences and feelings’ that somehow a biography seems redundant.

In 2006, a year after the publication of Kate Grenville’s The Secret River, Inga Clendinnen published ‘The History Question’ as part of Black Inc.’s Quarterly Essay series. ‘The History Question’ was, as its subtitle ‘Who Owns the Past?’ suggests, a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of historical understanding, and, more specifically, its uses and abuses. But at its heart lay an extended and surprisingly savage critique of The Secret River, the claims Clendinnen believed Grenville had made for it, and for fiction’s capacity to illuminate the past; and, more deeply, of the very idea of historical fiction.

Vertigo is to dizziness what a migraine is to a headache, or the flu to a cold in the head; you don’t really grasp the difference until you’ve had the nastier one. True vertigo pitches you into a chaotic blackness in which you lose your bearings utterly; no relief is to be had from sitting or lying down, because the chair, the bed, the floor all fall away from you as well. Disorientation on the flat is bad enough, but in three dimensions it is terrifying, like Satan’s journey through the realm of Chaos in Paradise Lost where he meets ‘a vast vacuitie: all unawares / Fluttering his pennons vain plumb down he drops / Ten thousand fadom deep, and to this hour / Down had been falling …’

With 827 pages of entries on individual performers, shows, composers, lyricists, directors and choreographers, together with almost another hundred pages of appendices covering the chronology of musicals, guides to recordings and awards, a bibliography and an index, this compilation is an impressive volume to appear under the name of a sole author. Thomas Hischak has already published more than a dozen works on various aspects of the American musical, and the present study is as comprehensive and many-sided as the genre itself.

In Robert Drewe’s latest collection of stories, people often find themselves caught in rip tides of ill fortune. Snake bites, car accidents, marauding dingoes, unexpected adulteries – these are all part of the rough seas of circumstance that crash without warning over the lives of Drewe’s characters. The dominant note of the collection is this quality of suddenness: out of the blue, bad things happen to good people. Most of The Rip’s characters are benign and likeable enough (even the shonky businessman awaiting trial on fraud charges is a long way from outright villainy), but each of them discovers the world turned upside down by what the title story calls ‘the abruptness of savage chance’.

One of the more successful ventures of Oxford University Press in the closing decades of the last century was a five-volume History of the British Empire. With more than a hundred contributors, this was a major undertaking, but its beginnings were not auspicious. Roger Louis, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin, was appointed editor-in-chief. That drew a public complaint from Max Beloff, an Oxford professor and founding principal of the private University of Buckingham, who was raised to the peerage by Margaret Thatcher. Beloff wanted to know why OUP was allowing an American to rewrite ‘our colonial history’.

Jim Sharman and Rex Cramphorn (a future artistic director of Melbourne’s Playbox Theatre) first met at NIDA in the 1960s, and Sharman returned there as a tutor in the 1970s. He was then a ‘radical populist’, while Cramphorn was scholarly, mad about Racine and Corneille. But they agreed that theatre was a vocation, and shared a ‘crypto-mystical’ interest in the slippery relationship between reality and illusion. They would set up a short-lived theatre company at the Paris Theatre (later demolished), and mount two premières of Australian plays, Dorothy Hewett’s Pandora’s Cross (1978) and Louis Nowra’s Visions (1979).

There’s a sleechy smell here, grey frogs on the bank
like slurried earth, rotund toads hopping across lily pads,
grunting like sultans trying out cushions. Fish mouth
the surface with so many unsinkable O’s, and the larval

Who was hanged, disembowelled and quartered after printing ‘nawghtye papystycall Bookes’? William Carter. Where did English booksellers store and sell their books? For several centuries, mostly from tiny shops near St Paul’s. How tiny is tiny? Zachary and William Stewart had ten feet from their shopfront to the back of the yard. Who was the builder and owner of the Temple of the Muses, the biggest bookshop of its time? James Lackington. How did eighteenth-century booksellers use newspapers to promote their wares? Through the ‘puff’, a sensationalist pushing of a single book, and the ‘cloud’, a lengthy listing of many books. Who remaindered Jane Austen’s Emma? John Murray II. The questions, big and small, are endless, and this book provides the answers.

In its 250 years of statehood, Afghanistan has gone through numerous episodes of political rupture. The principal causes of these upheavals have remained more or less the same: an underdeveloped economy and the inability of the rulers to shift from a tribal political culture, to a more participatory national politics based on modern and democratic national institutions and rules of governance. As a result, with rare exceptions, the rulers of Afghanistan have depended on foreign patrons and not on the human and material resources of the nation to rule. This political milieu of buying the support of tribal leaders has led to fratricidal wars of succession and pacification, with devastating consequences, resulting in extended periods of political and social unrest and lawlessness. These bloody conflicts, often called jihad by the contestants, have facilitated and even invited foreign interventions by the British, Russians, Pakistanis, Iranians, and now the Americans and their allies.

Mr Malik, a shy and thoughtful widower, has become enamoured with the dignified and intelligent Mrs Rose Mbikwa. Mrs Mbikwa is the leader of the Tuesday morning bird walk of the East African Ornithological Society. As Mr Malik painfully summons the courage to invite Mrs Mbikwa to the Hunt Ball, a rival appears on the scene in the form of the raffish, rich and unscrupulous Mr Khan. Instantly charmed upon meeting Mrs Mbikwa, he invites her to the annual Hunt Ball.

What are civilised men to do in such a crisis? Why, they retire to the Asadi Club where a wager is soon conceived: whoever can identify the most species of birds in a week will win the right to invite Mrs Mbikwa to the ball. A gauntlet is thrown; the birds are off – flying, flocking, frolicking – and the narrative moves up a gear.

Kathryn Lomer’s collection of short stories is ‘show, don’t tell’ storytelling with an emphasis on atmosphere instead of rapid plot movement. The best stories don’t have twists but end with a shift in perspective, a small victory or a solemn realisation. The book’s title is fitting: like the pinhole camera used by artists to isolate a single scene, Lomer’s stories are narrow in both scope and perspective. The stories are imagistic, even cinematic. Descriptions of light feature constantly: sunlight is triangled, louvred; fairy lights hide in vines, candles among food. Answering machines blink red in the dark.

Deception is an historical novel that adds to the emergent school of literary fiction concerned with dramatising historical investigation. As with any subgenre, certain conventions abide. The protagonist tends to be male, dour, a bit of a loner. His quest is usually sparked by a relic of some kind: a cache of letters, a photograph. Ultimately, history is shown to impinge on the present; the musty conundrums surrounding the relic are resolved; the protagonist may experience a vague epiphany.

In recent times, Queensland has developed a reputation as ‘an engine of national growth and innovation’. This reputation was boosted by the 2007 election of Queenslander Kevin Rudd as prime minister. In this edition of Griffith Review, subtitled ‘Hidden Queensland’, a range of contributors explore the evolution of the Australian state once best known ‘for its extremes of weather and politics’.

Much emphasis is given to Queensland’s history of radical political activism. Various contributors discuss the campaigns against the Vietnam War and (some time later) Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s conservative government. However, there are also descriptions of this state’s artistic and cultural achievements, an account of an adolescent girl’s ill-fated sexual dalliances with an older married couple, and a photographic essay on the lives of mentally ill Queensland residents.

The author of The Post-American World, Fareed Zakaria, has a reputation that suggests the prototype for the twenty-first century Renaissance man. Zakaria was born in India, with Muslim roots but a secular upbringing. He was educated at a Christian school, then at Yale and Harvard. He studied international relations with two luminaries in the field, Samuel P. Huntington and Stanley Hoffmann. Add to this good looks, a facility with words and experience in journalism, and it is no wonder that it was he who succeeded in getting a serious foreign affairs show on to CNN.

But all that sophistication can descend into glibness. The international citizen, who might have brought a new perspective on geopolitics, has instead looked at these issues primarily because he wants the best for his adopted country, the United States. There is nothing wrong with that if it is a clearly stated aim rather than being buried at the back of the book in the acknowledgments. It also makes Zakaria seem less cosmopolitan than anticipated.

Catherine Mckinnon is known around Adelaide for her work as a writer–director with the State Theatre and Red Shed Theatre companies. In 2006 she won the Penguin/Australian Women’s Weekly short story competition and obviously came to the attention of Penguin editors. The Nearly Happy Family, her first novel, is described on the front cover as ‘a tragic comedy’.

Despite the plot containing a probable suicide, an attempted suicide and a death, this is essentially a light-hearted, if overlong, family saga whose theme is summed up by one of the narrators, forty-three-year-old Jackie Delaney: ‘Who needs enemies when you have family?’ Jackie is a flaky, struggling pub comedian and the other narrator is Claire, her fifteen-year-old daughter. In alternating chapters, each relates what happens to them over the course of a year. The plot covers well-trodden ground: the dysfunctional family and mother–daughter conflict.

Philip mead’s Networked Language: Culture & History in Australian Poetry is an extraordinary piece of scholarly writing: large, ambitious, meticulously researched, brilliantly written and quite original. It is laudable not only for these inherent virtues but also, it has to be said, because of its very existence. Australian Scholarly Publishing is to be commended for publishing such a work. If poetry is marginal to Australian public culture (as we are routinely told), then works about Australian poetry are all but invisible. It is all the more notable, then, that Mead’s work should join another recently published, large-scale work on modern Australian poetry: Ann Vickery’s Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry, published by Salt in 2007. Both Mead’s and Vickery’s books use Australian poetry as a way of intervening in, or instigating, debates in modern politico-cultural history. (And to these studies we may also add another ambitious piece of poetry criticism, John Kinsella’s more globally focused Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester University Press, 2007.)

War, on a sudden, and at one stroke, overwhelms, extinguishes, abolishes, whatever is cheerful, whatever is happy and beautiful, and pours a foul torrent of disasters on the life of mortals – no sooner does the storm of war begin to lower, than what a deluge of miseries and misfortune seizes, inundates, and overwhelms all things within the sphere of its action! The flock are scattered, the harvest trampled, the husband-man butchered, villas and villages burnt – cities and states, that have been ages rising to their flourishing state, subverted by the fury of one tempest, the storm of war. So much easier is the task of doing harm than of doing good; of destroying than of building!

These words from Erasmus sum up what C.A.J. Coady, professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne, calls the moral scandal of war. Erasmus was clearly not on the bedside table of George W. Bush when he launched his war on Iraq, a war which some have argued was waged with the intent of doing good (an argument to which Coady gives little credit), but one which has shown again how much easier it is to do harm. Michael Walzer’s aphorism ‘War kills: that is all it does’ is also used to highlight the moral scandal of war. Coady takes Walzer’s point but, like Erasmus, wants to make us see that war in fact does a lot more than kill: ‘it also maims, distorts, and injures in many complex, enduring ways. It transforms people, both warriors and those caught up in the violence, and radically alters the normal conditions of their existence.’

Can such violence be morally justified? What manner of thinking should we use in considering whether to resort to war? If it is true that the primary effect of war is killing and destruction, is there any scope at all for the discussion of what Coady calls ‘altruistic wars’? These are wars waged with the intention of doing good and preventing or ending a harm that is manifest.

Coady wants to pursue the moral issues raised by these questions at a yet more fundamental level. Built into many of the standard debates about these questions is the view that the moral legitimacy of war (such as it is) has in part to do with the formal structures of the international state system. On this view, we are not discussing political violence, but state sanctioned force: the former is dismissed as out of bounds, the latter is legitimised because of the formal structures of the relationships between states. Coady takes this to be a specious distinction. He says, ‘Given the appalling record of states in the unjustified employment of lethal force to devastate populations, economies, and cultures over the centuries, I am unimpressed by any attempt to put a conceptual or moral gulf between the resort to state force … for political purposes by state agencies and its political employment by nonstate actors.’ He sees no justification for ‘smuggl[ing] into the terms of our discussion some bias in favour of states when they employ morally contestable means’.

Coady’s ambition, then, is to set out a framework for the evaluation of political violence which can encompass all forms of violence employed for political purposes. All manner of agents are included, be they states, individuals, terror cells, international government organisations, non-government organisations or corporations. Similarly, all forms of violence are included. War, certainly; but also interventions, terrorist acts, armed revolutions, violent demonstrations, the activities of mercenaries and private corporations, and so on.

Coady argues that the appropriate general moral framework for evaluating all cases of political violence is that known as the Just War Tradition, which he views as a broadly non-consequentialist moral theory underpinned by an ecumenical common-sense morality. The Just War Tradition poses various ethical tests for the conduct of war, known as jus ad bellum, jus in bello and, more recently, jus post bellum: that is, the justification of going to war, the justification of the conduct of war, and the justification of postwar policy and behaviour. Various parts of the book are taken up with the explication of these ethical considerations, and their application to all the categories of political violence which Coady treats, notwithstanding the tradition’s own focus on war.

Coady’s discussion of the Just War Tradition is broad and wide-ranging, and is clearly informed by prodigious scholarship. Quite often his arguments are in response to positions taken by the important contemporary exponent of the tradition, Michael Walzer. On most of these occasions, Coady is contesting Walzer’s position. For example, Coady engages with Walzer’s theory of a state’s right to defend itself against aggression. Coady says Walzer’s theory is both too strong and too weak, and, in addition, is insensitive to human rights. It is too strong, in that Walzer too readily licenses a victim of aggression (a state) to embark on war. It is too weak because restricting the legitimacy of a just war to the case where one state is responding to aggression from another leaves any number of other evils in the international order untouched. Overall, his theory seems to sanction the contemporary arrangements of international society, rather than challenging them on human rights grounds (see chapter four).

Another example is Coady’s critique of Walzer’s position on who should bear responsibility for the decision to go to war. Walzer’s view is that responsibility lies with the ruler alone, not with citizens or soldiers. He quotes Shakespeare’s Henry V approvingly: ‘we know enough if we know that we are the king’s subjects. If his cause be wrong, our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us.’ Coady will have none of this: ‘Walzer’s invocation of a moral outlook on political obligation perhaps appropriate to the relations between a fifteenth-century absolute monarch and his subjects as a model for contemporary democratic political theory is simply astonishing …’ Walzer, though perhaps the pre-eminent, is only one of many theorists with whom Coady engages. My regret here is that this engagement is not presented systematically; a fuller treatment may have helped the cohesiveness of the book.

This is a significant consideration, because the book is long and rich, and treats many aspects of the question of political violence: aggression, violence, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, the immunities of combatants, mercenaries, conscientious objection, the romance of war, the psychology of warriors and so on. These accounts are contained within fourteen chapters. Many of these chapters have been published before in part or full, and this helps to explain the occasional lack of cohesiveness and the variability in tone.

At times the reader is exposed to unnecessarily arcane arguments. For example, in chapter two, the idea of violence is analysed closely; but most of this chapter is spent dismissing views which Coady has little time for himself: for example, the views of Johan Galtung, which he suggests are ‘either muddled or mischievous (and just possibly both)’. Why they need to be rehashed is unclear; far better to use the space for Coady’s own, unmuddled, ideas.

The book could have been better organised to ensure that readers do not become confused about the complex ideas that Coady discusses. There is no general introduction to the book: the reader is launched into the deep end. The last chapter, which also engages with Walzer, has much of note to say, but ends rather abruptly and may leave the reader wishing for a bold and decisive restatement of the main themes and arguments of the book. These points matter all the more because of Coady’s stated hope that the book will aid ‘interested nonspecialists’.

Coady says, towards the end, ‘Two things are important in doing moral philosophy: one is intellectual openness to a range of views, including confronting ones, and another is an awareness that intellectual exercises in this area can have profound implications for life.’ This book is a fine demonstration of how one must be open to and engaged with a range of views, even when at odds with them.

Similarly, Coady’s moral seriousness is exemplary. Political ideas have enormous consequences for people’s lives; ideas about the political use of violence have consequences which are truly stark. Coady has done a fine service to the reading public by making available his reflections on these questions for our own consideration and judgement.

‘There’s a fine line … between fear and desire’ muses Shutterspeed’s adolescent protagonist, Dustin. His may not be a novel revelation but A.J. Betts provides an intriguing study of obsession and its disastrous results through a narrative set on this tremulous boundary.

Pertinent to the meaning of reality television is the understanding that it focuses on real life. There are no actors, no scripts and no staged events to provoke drama; the camera simply captures life as it happens, and we become ‘peeping toms’ for the duration of the programme.

William Kostakis is alert to this illusion. He expressed his disdain for reality television in an article in the Age on the eve of the Big Brother finale in July. For Kostakis, reality television is mundane, full of wannabes who become famous – albeit for fifteen minutes –for doing nothing but engaging in mindless banter. The people are not real, but rather caricatures that are moulded through sophisticated editing and styling for pure spectacle and entertainment.

Lucy’s parents have separated, and she is off to London to visit her mother and her new family. She is fortunate to be able to fly: the world is in the grip of perpetual rain, and travel is restricted. Some inhabitants have become amphibians; others live in government camps. But Lucy’s fate is rather more intriguing. A cloud boy (seen only by Lucy) appears outside the plane window before being snatched away by a ghoulish cloud creature. As they wait in the rain at a bus stop in London, Lucy and a boy called Daniel are whisked up to Cloudland by a peculiar woman called January. There it is the task of Lucy, Daniel and assorted Cloudlanders to rid the heavens of the evil Kazia and thus stop the rain on Earth and prevent the onset of an ice age – an interesting premise.

This edition of Arena Journal is essentially an extended critique of neo-liberalism. In his editorial, John Hinkson argues that neo-liberal thought ‘carries a new way of life that distances us from the past, in part through the promise of a cornucopia of commodities’. As Hinkson and the various contributors suggest, though, this phenomenon really ‘threatens cultural disaster for everyone’.

Nine years ago Oxford University Press (UK) abandoned its vaunted poetry series, the Oxford Poets. This was a bitter business, much criticised around the world. Among the featured poets were Basil Bunting, Fleur Adcock, D.J. Enright and Gwen Harwood. Much of Peter Porter’s poetry appeared in the series, including his Collected Poems (1999), published just before the controversial sell-off. Some of the original poets, and collections, now appear in Oxford-Poets, an imprint of Carcanet Press. These include Joseph Brodsky’s Collected Poems in English and Elaine Feinstein’s great edition of Marina Tsvetaeva’s Selected Poems. Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s new collection, Telling a Hawk from a Handsaw, appears in Oxford Poets. Readers will recognise several poems which first appeared in ABR. Peter Porter is quoted on the back cover: ‘[Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s] allies are words and he uses them with the care of a surgeon and the flair of a conjuror.’

Barbara Jefferis Award 2009

Entries for the Barbara Jefferis Award 2009 are now open. The Award, valued at $35,000, is offered annually for ‘the best novel written by an Australian author that depicts women and girls in a positive way or otherwise empowers the status of women and girls in society’.

Jaynie Anderson, the third Herald Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne, initiated the study of Australian art historiography with fine accounts of the three scholars – Ursula Hoff, Franz Philipp and Joseph Burke – who form the focus of this book. Surprisingly, Professor Anderson’s contributions are barely mentioned, and she is not listed among the fifty-five people Sheridan Palmer has consulted. Some published memoirs of past students of Philipp and Burke go unmentioned in the text and are omitted from the bibliography. None of this encourages.

From the start, names of prominent figures are misspelled. Adalbert Stifter, the nineteenth-century Austrian novelist, becomes ‘Walbert Stifter’. Jacob Burckhardt turns into ‘Burchardt’; we are even treated to ‘Burchardtian’. Sir Sydney Cockerell gets two strikes as he becomes ‘Sir Sidney Cockerall’. Alois Riegl, the Viennese art historian, is ‘Reigl’ in these pages. Artists, too, take a pounding from Dr Palmer’s errant spellcheck. Yves Tanguy is now ‘Tanguey’; and Robert Delaunay is ‘Delauney’. ‘Moshe Kistler’ is, I take it, a stab at Moishe Kisling; ‘Teitsis Zikaris’ is a wayward attempt at Teisutis Zikaras; and his fellow Centre 5 sculptor Vincas Jomantas must surely be Dr Palmer’s ‘Vincent Yomantis’. Tachists are now ‘Taschistes’; the Durack Ranges are ‘Durak’; and scholars write ‘magnus opus’ and so on.

In her editorial, Gina Mercer observes that this ‘is a decidedly poetic edition of Island’. Mercer bids farewell to poetry editor James Charlton, and announces the 2008 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize. Also, the journal showcases the work of writers who are committed to what Mercer refers to as ‘the joyous and endangered art of poetry’.

The edition opens with a conversation between prominent Australian poets Judith Beveridge and Dorothy Porter. This piece is titled ‘Poetry Animals’ and describes the way in which both poets have used animals in their work. In the following pages, we find a range of poems, as well as essays on poetry-writing by Myron Lysenko and Kris Hemensley. There are also several short fiction pieces and reviews.

Antoine Capet’s pithy observation that commemoration is the continuation of history by other means neatly defines the focus of Peter Stanley’s latest book and the problem that he sets out to grapple with. The recently successful advocacy of a ‘Battle for Australia’ annual commemoration flies in the face of the historical record and the evidence that supports it, but the advocates of the popular notion that the Japanese stood poised to invade Australia in 1942 have never allowed the facts to get in the way of a firmly rooted belief.

Stanley is no stranger to the controversy that his position provokes. Since 2002, but especially since 2005, he has publicly and consistently argued that the evidence not only does not support the popular notion of an imminent invasion, but clearly refutes it. For his trouble he has received all the usual abusive ‘commentary’ that is the lot of those who attempt to shake popular certainty concerning one or other cherished belief: aspersions on his character, questioning of his qualifications and rubbishing of his (assumed) nationality. The standard of public debate in this country is frequently pretty low, and usually so when matters of current defence policy and our military history are the subject matter.

Setting the record straight

Dear Editor,

I have to write in support of your reviewer, Nicholas Brown, in expressing reservations about the speculative nature of much of the material in Susanna de Vries’s Desert Queen: The Many Lives and Loves of Daisy Bates (April 2008). I judge only by her treatment of Ernestine Hill (whom I knew very well as my mother’s cousin, and for whom I am literary executor). Since some people are proposing a biography of Ernestine, it is most important to set the record straight.

There was never any parallel between Ernestine’s pregnancy and that of the typical ‘girls’ of that period. An abortion was never even considered. She was delighted with her pregnancy and recorded that the birth of her son, Robert, was the ‘happiest day of my life’.

In the beginning, says a much-repeated joke, was The Plan. Deemed excellent, at first, it passed through many reinterpretations at successive levels of bureaucracy, and ended up being derided as a crock of shit. Britain’s plan for reconstructing Iraq in 2003 might have met the same fate, only there wasn’t one. Don’t laugh: Australia had no plan either, excellent or crock.

The United States did have a plan, but it had been drawn up by the State Department before the invasion of Iraq, and the Pentagon ignored it. After the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under Paul ‘Jerry’ Bremer took over the reconstruction of Iraq, it drew up another plan, but he ignored that too. Perhaps Bremer was guided by the aphorism of H.L. Mencken that the well-known solution to every human problem is neat, plausible and wrong.

In 1880, John Peter Russell left Sydney to seek an artistic education and, like many painters of the time, ended up in Paris. Vincent van Gogh also migrated to the city’s ateliers, and in 1886 they met. The friendship that developed between the twenty-eight-year-old Australian and the thirty-three-year-old Dutchman continued until the latter’s death four years later. Russell painted a penetrating portrait of Van Gogh that captures both the intensity and untrusting nature of his mentally vulnerable subject. The two men exchanged letters, and Van Gogh sent Russell sketches and photographs.

Anthony Lynch, enterprising editor of the notable but short-lived Space magazine, also produces signed, limited-edition chapbooks under the moniker of Whitmore Press. Paul Kane’s A Slant of Light and Brendan Ryan’s A Tight Circle join a list that features Maria Takolander’s Narcissism and Cameron Lowe’s Throwing Stones at the Sun (both 2005).

I grew up reading rubbish and then reread it all again when I got older and called it nostalgia. Rubbish is great. The most lucid (and mercifully brief) account of rubbish reading I have read is Peter Dickinson’s ‘A Defense of Rubbish’. He wrote it for Children’s Literature and Education in 1970, but a version is available on his website (www.peterdickinson.com). Children, Dickinson argues, need to have access to a ‘whole culture’ in order to build an authentically owned spectrum of value. They also need to have a sense of belonging, and a shared culture of rubbish reading may play a role in this. At one level, adults need to let children discover rubbish and non-rubbish for themselves rather than always prescribing and rating their reading. I am maintaining a dutiful sense of irony as I type this.

Literature is full of unexpected coincidences. After a long silence, two books appear within a matter of months that present both a detailed, personal and a deeply investigative account of those unique political partners, Joseph and Enid Lyons.

Enid Burrell Lyons, born in 1897 to Eliza and William Burrell, a sawyer in Tasmania’s northern timber country, is an unexpected candidate for the designation ‘Leading Lady to a Nation’. To an older generation, Dame Enid Lyons is remembered as our second female federal parliamentarian (Dorothy Tangney earlier served in the Senate), linked inevitably at that time with issues relating to mothers and children. For a younger generation, her name holds little resonance. In this new biography, however, Anne Henderson, deputy director of the Sydney Institute and biographer of several politically oriented women, has lifted the veil and revealed how a young woman drawn from a humble rural background, combining spunk, determination and strong girlish appeal, could capture the heart of a senior minister in the Tasmanian parliament, marry him at the age of seventeen, assist him as premier of Tasmania, ride with him as an active consort to the prime ministership of Australia and, with his sudden death in office, carve out a political career of her own.

The Australian migrant experience is often regarded through the prism of the postwar experience and the waves of immigration and exodus, chiefly from Europe. Today, except among historians, the settlement of Australia is often the butt of colonial and convict humour, or the stuff of pop-cultural iconography and self-identification. This comes at the expense of a true appreciation and understanding of Australia’s rich cultural and demographic origins. In the light of recent cultural debates regarding ethnicity and multiculturalism, it is clear that our understanding of our society, and the varied backgrounds of its constituents, is wanting.

Diane Fahey’s The Mystery of Rosa Morland (Clouds of Magellan, $24.95 pb, 143 pp) is a tour de force, a brooding, postmodern Gothic poem cum novella that provides a happy ending of sorts for characters who deserve one. The poetry, capturing individual voices, is at once accomplished, sensuous and serviceable.

There has been no escaping Graeme Blundell lately. There was Catharine Lumby’s astute reappraisal of his image-making Alvin Purple for the Currency Australian Classics series; and, as I write, the advertisements for the new local documentary Not Quite Hollywood feature a bare-chested Blundell in a pair of unforgivable 1970s flares. Now, here is his own account of how he got to be that way – and a good deal more.

Roads are not places, but ways to and away from them, perhaps in fearful flight or in buoyant expectation. Travelling them can engender boredom (‘Are we there yet?’) and horror (‘Will we ever get there, alive?’). Roads are means of reaching those fabled and amorphous Australian locations – the city, the bush, the beach. Each of these has attracted anthologies (some from Penguin). Delia Falconer’s task, as editor of The Penguin Book of the Road, is less straightforward, being concerned with how we travel rather than where we arrive, with highways but also with indirect, crooked ways. In a masterly and challenging introduction, she warns us of what to expect.