Percy Grainger walked to avoid self-flagellation. David Sedaris walked to placate his Fitbit. Virginia Woolf walked the streets of London, and later the South Downs, endlessly: because she loved it, because she was walking her dogs, because she needed to think clearly. For Henry Thoreau, every walk was a sort of ‘crusade’. Sarah Marquis, who walked 16,000 kilometres over three years, sought a return to an essential self. ‘You become what nature needs you to be: this wild thing.’¹ Will Self began walking after he gave up heroin, though in his novel Walking to Hollywood (2010) the protagonist walks not to escape addiction but because he fears he has Alzheimer’s. This feels familiar. My brother jokes about starting a group called Running Away from Dementia. Sometimes, catching sight of my reflected posture on a walk, I wonder if I am doing the same thing, walking away from fate. If so, could one ever walk fast enough?

Last October, some friends and I chose to walk the extent of Broadway. We started at a point that was once a village called Marble Hill and sat on the tip of Manhattan. At the end of the nineteenth century, a shipping canal was tucked in behind its southern edge, rendering the tiny town an island in the Harlem River. Nine years later, with a flourish of landfill, it was attached again, this time to the northern mainland – a vestige of Manhattan amid the Bronx. Small facts like this delight me.

I don’t know who built the Broadway Bridge, which links Marble Hill to its old stomping ground, but Native Americans worked on many of the bridges and skyscrapers of New York: ‘sky walkers’ they were called. Our walking was more prosaic: eight Australians, one of them male; all bookish types. We met under the bridge before heading over it, southward to Inwood. It is green up there, and the large park that sits between the Hudson and Broadway rises steeply from the street. Among its tall trees are remnants of Manhattan’s original forests; in its swamps the original salt marshes. The bald eagle, a species that has clawed its way back from being ‘endangered’ to ‘threatened’, has been re-released into the park after more than a hundred years of absence.

Sophie Cunningham in New York (photograph by Virginia Murdoch)

 

I had only been to Inwood once before, one hot Sunday afternoon. Music blared from cars and shops; we ate shaved ice while standing on street corners. This day was colder, quieter. It was fall, sunny, ten degrees. The weather here turns on a dime, was already moving, swiftly, towards a new season. By the time we reached Battery Point eight hours later, it would feel like winter. We had much ground to cover, so we moved quickly, passing the incongruous Dyckman Farm House without much more than a glance. Built in 1794, it sat small, low, out of time, surrounded by a cottage garden, looking across to a gas station and a gymnasium.

‘I wonder if I am doing the same thing, walking away from fate’

Walking is often a solitary activity, but on this day it was gloriously social. Conversation ebbed and flowed as the eight of us moved between one another and talked. It was like a slow, elaborate dance. Judy and I discussed our feet at some length. Do they wear out with age? It was a question that had been on my mind as both the necessity and pleasure of walking New York’s streets had taken its toll. Around Washington Heights, Francesca and I talked about parents. She had lost one of hers to dementia as I was losing one of mine. We discussed what it was like to witness such unravelling, and wondered what it was like to experience it. As if to answer our question, leaves flew around in the wind. There was a scattering, a loss of coherence.

The sun moved up, then overhead, to the west. By the time we walked through Times Square, it had disappeared behind the skyscrapers. Deep in the canyons of the city, the wind whipped up the avenue. We moved past lumbering humans dressed as Muppets and superheroes. By now we were in single file; talking had ceased. Walt Whitman’s description of Broadway as ‘unspeakable’ suddenly felt apt.

‘Walt Whitman’s description of Broadway as ‘‘unspeakable’’ suddenly felt apt’

Ten or so blocks later, Virginia took a photograph of us crossing the road to Madison Square Gardens, Francesca striding out in front, Persephone-like. We rested in the park. Squirrels scampered over us, looking for food. Donica fed them nuts. The squirrels’ audacity revived us temporarily, but by SoHo we were cold and tired again. Lucy, tiny and compact, looked as if she might simply keel over. My feet throbbed in their boots. The pavement made everything harder, more jarring. People crowded the streets in a buzz about the beauty of the streetscape, excited by the weight of their huge shopping bags. We were by now immune to such pleasures, driven to get this insane venture over and done with. It was around six pm, near the Wall Street Bull, when we arrived at Number One. We could see the water and, yes, the Statue of Liberty. We had walked close to thirty kilometres. ‘Didn’t you say it was twenty-one?’ someone asked me. We cheered, took photos for Instagram, then headed towards a pub on Stone Street, one of the first roads to be paved in Manhattan.

(photograph by Virginia Murdoch)Two days after our walk along Broadway, my yoga teacher decided that the time had come to discuss the articulation of the feet: specifically, drawing up from the arches to activate your legs, mobilise your core. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘you do this.’ She moved her foot almost imperceptibly, just enough that I could see tiny muscles ripple as she planted it firmly on the ground before stretching herself. She stood taller, lighter – not quite in the league of Menuhin conducting Beethoven’s fifth with his feet while standing on his head, but still impressive.

‘As a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association ...’ Rebecca Solnit writes in Wanderlust: A History of Walking.² It is true that one of the common uses of walking is to permit a writer a meandering narrative. But should digressions be allowed when walking? On an even colder walk a few weeks later, the question as to whether these were permissible became a topic of conversation. Sure, an obscure pizza place on Avenue J which makes THE BEST PIZZA IN NEW YORK might only be a few blocks off Flatbush, but if we had dedicated ourselves to a day of coming to know Flatbush Avenue, could we seek experiences outside it? ‘The blogs I have read,’ I said authoritatively, ‘say that if you plan to walk the full extent of an avenue you should not step off the path. That is not in the spirit of the walk.’  The day already promised a carousel in Prospect Park, Caribbean Curry, old-style diners, theatres, and the high school where both Barbra Streisand and Neil Diamond were educated. What more could we ask?

I am not a consistent person and my rule, within seconds of being announced, was challenged by happenstance. As we walked towards the Flatlands Reformed Church – built on the site of a Native American village in 1654 and therefore a goal of sorts – I realised it was off Flatbush. I hesitated momentarily before turning left onto Alton Place. It was worth it. A plaque in the church gardens told us lots of things, including the fact that George Washington had ridden this road in April 1790. On the same plaque there was a reference to Indian Braves, but not to the village that had once been there. A woman offered to show us around the church, which was white, simple, wooden, plain. Once inside I looked up at the ordinary painted roof that had no adornment of any kind, then to the balcony at the back of the church. ‘That’s where the slaves sat,’ the woman, who herself was African American, told us.

Flatlands Reformed Church (photograph by Jim Henderson)

 

We retraced our steps and turned left onto Flatbush. To our disappointment, it was not long before the avenue was eight lanes wide and lined by shopping malls. All charm vanished. It was tempting to give up, especially as no one seemed to know where the original Flatbush began or ended. But we chose not to be churlish and kept on going. Suddenly, to our left, was a coastal channel lined with houses, their balconies hanging low over the water. Mills Basin. It was only three pm, but the light was pearly-grey, moving towards the pink of sunset. Sea birds circled in large numbers. We walked a bit further and saw a pier jutting out into the water, lined with petrol pumps. Virginia stood for a moment then said, ‘This looks like Metung.’  She was right, but it felt strange to feel echoes of the Gippsland Lakes, here in the most populated borough of New York. That has been one of the wonders of Brooklyn. There is so much nature here, albeit nature that is struggling to hold its own.

Three months after first arriving in Brooklyn, I had the chance to acquaint myself with its wilder side. When I stepped out of a car at Plumb Beach, I felt such a rush of surprise and relief that tears sprang to my eyes. The sea. Open sky. A narrow stretch of sand. Though windy and grey, it wasn’t cold. There were wind surfers, and in the distance, factories. Feral cats prowled the low-lying dunes.

(photograph by Sophie Cunningham)

 

I had signed up as a volunteer to count mating pairs of Horseshoe Crabs. Our business was to keep track of their numbers so that they could officially be listed as endangered, a status that might afford them some legal protection. The crabs used to thrive on the shores, but today the numbers are modest. An immodest quantity – 500,000 or so – are hung up each year in labs, and partially drained of their blood. Their blood enables the identification of bacteria in particular pharmaceutical products, and the pale-blue liquid sells for $15,000 a quart. After being bled they are returned to the ocean, where many of them ‘fail to thrive’. Instead they drift around, half alive, unable to breed. Before pharmaceutical companies discovered them, they used to be harvested by the million for fertiliser. Despite these modern pressures, they look much as they did half a billion years ago – prehistoric.

Before hanging out with the crabs, I did my homework. I found out that they lived for decades; that they had nine eyes scattered about (on their shell, beside their mouth); and the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded in 1967 in part for research performed on the Horseshoe Crab eye. I knew the females were startlingly large – as much as sixty centimetres in length. No photo could prepare me for the awesomeness, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, of these creatures. They look like dark-brown, thickset, barnacled dinner plates circa 1970. I fell in love with them immediately. I picked one up, using two hands and grasping either side of its large shell. It flailed at me all the while, using its claws and legs like spears. I got the message and put it down.

When they are mating, the males attach themselves to the females with their ‘claspers’, which are small claws, and then ride out the waves so they can get to smooth sand. If they make it to the shoreline, they secure themselves by digging into the sand before getting down to business. Often a female crab will have several male crabs attached to her. We picked them up in pairs and brought them in to measure and tag. When we did so, the male would hover close to the female, though one lone guy wandered off in the other direction, leading to gags about a lack of chemistry. The tagging meant drilling a small hole in the corner of their shells and sometimes the pale-blue blood that makes them so valuable spurted out, translucent. I would plug the hole up quickly with a plastic tag, worried that I had hurt them. I don’t make any claim to know if the crabs feel pain, or think what we’d call thoughts. As they rode out the waves of a beach off Brooklyn, were they oblivious to the industrial city pressing down upon them? Did they notice that the tide was high? That the water temperature was eighteen degrees (we measured it) and the air outside a bit less? Or that a full moon was rising? They must have had some instinct for all this, for it was the sea temperature, the tide, and the moon that were bringing them together.

Horseshoe Crab (photograph by Sophie Cunningham)

 

When I spoke of my concerns about the fate of the Horseshoe Crab at a writers’ festival recently, Antony Loewenstein, an activist and writer whom I knew and admired, asked me to explain my interest. He wasn’t trying to be rude, he said; he just found my concern so random. And he’s right, it is. We are in the midst of the sixth extinction, living, as political scientist Audra Mitchell puts it, through ‘an unmaking of being’.³ Fifty-two per cent of our biodiversity was destroyed between 1970 and 2010. Why focus on these barnacled dinner plates?

‘Fifty-two per cent of our biodiversity was destroyed between 1970 and 2010. Why focus on these barnacled dinner plates?’

Random. The word interests me. As I get older, I no longer try to find meaning in order so much as draw meaning from randomness. I feel this strongly: things are both random and connected, all the time. Leonard Woolf used to say ‘nothing matters’ by which he meant ‘everything matters’. All of it. The lot.

Not long after Antony’s question, a friend, Helen, emailed me to tell me that her grandson had asked her to suggest something ‘random’ he could draw. Helen had said to him, ‘I’ve just read a book about Cyclone Tracy. A lady said she looked out and saw dogs sailing through the air with their chains still on.’ ‘Yes, that is random,’ her grandson agreed, before producing a drawing of doubled-over palm trees, with chickens and dogs flying through the air.

So we talked about this word, Helen and I. She had found a description of it as ‘the latest buzzword used amongst mindless teenagers as a way of showing just how utterly irreverent their predictable sense of humour is’. That seemed harsh. To us the word’s usage meant something closer to ‘weird and not particularly logical’. Helen asked her grandson what he meant by the word. The eight-year-old gave the question some thought before saying, ‘It’s hard to give a definition of a word without using the word itself.’

I feel increasingly compelled to walk to random places, to know them through the soles of my feet. On the last day of fall, we walked Brooklyn’s longest avenue: Bedford. It took us from the serenity of circling white swans at Sheepshead Bay, past kilometres of family homes and dog-walking locals, Brooklyn College, and multiple high schools. In the morning, the sun was shining, but by the afternoon the day took on a greyer cast. We walked through what was once known as Automotive Row and past the now abandoned Studebaker showroom. We walked through Crown Heights and Bed-Stuy. We walked into South Williamsburg, home to many of New York’s Hasidic Jews. We did not feel welcome there and walked purposely, swiftly, to indicate we did not mean to offend. It was a shock to arrive at the divide between South Williamsburg and the north, a border so clear it was if we had arrived in another country, with bikes and bike lanes, bars and street art. Of all the walks we did this was the one where gentrification, undergone or resisted, was most apparent. Brooklyn has become one of the least affordable places to live in America.

It would be nice to make some theoretical claim here (many have) that meandering walks represent the creative process. But you could walk forever and not end up with words on a page. That doesn’t seem so terrible to me. I listen to politicians engage in rhetoric, semantics, and blatant lies. I attempt to use language to describe various concerns, and fall into apocalyptic cliché. My Dad, sitting in a home losing words by the day, is yet another reminder of the ways in which language can fail us. It is images I turn to now: a hundred-year-old photo of a man standing atop a pile of bison corpses; Pacific Islanders trying to sweep the rising sea from their homes; the Adelaide Hills on fire.

‘As I get older, I no longer try to find meaning in order so much as draw meaning from randomness’

Not long ago, an article from the Washington Post described American psychologist Martin Seligman’s experiments of 1967. ‘He put a dog into a box with two chambers divided by a barrier that could be jumped over. When one chamber became electrified, the dog ran around frantically, finally scrambling over the barrier to escape the shock. In later trials, evading the shock becomes easier and easier for the animal until it would just stand next to the barrier waiting to jump. But the outcome is much more grim if a dog first learns that electric shocks are uncontrollable and unavoidable. If animals were repeatedly shocked while tied up beforehand, then later placed in the same box free to roam, most didn’t jump the barrier. Instead, they lay down while whining and taking the jolt. Subsequent trials showcased the animal’s same passive, defeatist response.’⁴ These experiments seem horrendous to me, and the lesson obvious: helplessness can be learned. The findings, when published, went onto inform CIA interrogation techniques.

So: walking. We walk to get to one place from another, but in doing so we insist that what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present. They bond us to place, to people. Walking opens our hearts. Thoughts stop swirling in tight circles. They loosen up. Meander. Slow down.

My walks are usually contained and urban, but that is not always the case, and more physically challenging treks take on a different cast. The undertow of history exerts its subtle force on city walks but is more constant in older landscapes. The second day of the Inca Trail in Peru took us over two passes 4,000 metres high, a series of extreme ascents and descents. The first was called Dead Woman’s Pass: something to do with the silhouettes the mountains form, though it felt more ominous than that. When I got to an Incan ruin after about nine hours of this and saw there was another hour to go before we reached our camp, I cried and swore. (‘I loved it when you said “Fuck this for a joke”,’ an Irishwoman in our group enthused.) The pain quickly receded, and what I remember now are vertical gardens hanging from sheer cliffs, cloud forests, humming birds so tiny that at first I thought they were colourful bumblebees, orchids growing between the cracks of stones in abandoned ruins, and terraces, breathtaking in their scale, stepping their way down the Andes.

At first, ruins seem picturesque, but the more of them you walk over the more the specific details grab you: you find yourself wondering how massive granite boulders were carved so particularly. We asked, and were told that cold water was poured into natural fissures when the boulders were hot from sitting in the sun. This would cause the cracks to widen so that wedges could be inserted, and over time the rocks would split. How long would it take to build a city in this fashion?

While I walked leadenly through the rain, porters sprinted past me. I imagined the young messengers who ran relays across what are now several countries, barefoot. I asked our guide if the Incas had a written language. He became frustrated as he answered me, because the ways in which his ancestors communicated were not recognised as language. He told me that messengers carried ‘talking knots’, or string arranged like a necklace with knotted strands that look – to a modern eye – like macramé. The knots don’t relate directly to spoken words, but the Spanish were quick to ban them on the grounds they could not interpret them. The Incas could, in effect, talk about them behind their backs.

Then there was Machu Picchu. I had been so focused on the journey, on simply breathing at high altitude, that the destination quite took my breath away. As I stood at the Sun Gate and looked down upon it, a dozen stories came to life: tales of lost cities, Tintin’s Prisoners of the Sun (1949) brought to life. Grey stone buildings and terraces sat against vivid green jungle in the clefts of several mountains. The precision of the layout reflected sophisticated agricultural and irrigation systems, nuanced astrological understandings. Houses were a mix of the humble and the grand, alongside temples dedicated to the sun, the moon, and the condor. It was a shock to realise that, despite such impeccable planning, the city was inhabited for only a century before emptying out. This was not because the remote Machu Picchu was discovered, nor because it was attacked. It was smallpox – introduced by the Spanish – which destroyed much of the population. The end, when it came, was swift.

On our last day in Peru, we walked around Saqsaywaman, a ruined settlement above Cusco. The remaining boulders had proved too heavy for colonists to use for other purposes. Monumental, they formed the base of walls that jutted this way and that for hundreds of metres. Some said the zigzag represented lightning bolts, others that the walls were stylised puma’s teeth. I walked across a plain to the hill opposite to decide for myself. As I stood there, I tried not to think of the Andean condors we saw at an animal rescue centre earlier that day, nor the de-clawed pumas. Both Peruvian national symbols, they are now endangered. The walls, I decided, were lightning bolts, but it was hard to get a proper perspective.

Saqsaywaman (photograph by Lalo Campos, via Wikimedia Commons)

 

As you move through history, history moves into you, more surely than if you read it. Writers mark the page, but walkers mark the earth, and the earth in turn marks us. In Incan constellations, animals are found in the negative space, the black between the stars. When the Incas first saw the Spanish, they believed they were part-human and part-animal because they arrived on horseback; man and horse were considered one creature. I carry these ideas with me: that there is meaning in the space between, that we and the creatures that carry us are one.

The writer Ray Bradbury lived in Los Angeles and walked its streets for sixty-eight years without driving a car, fantastically obstinate in a city that is a monument to the oil industry. But Los Angeles is not alone in its abandonment of human scale. It is New York that is the odd city out, New York that has invited people to walk its streets for hundreds of years. Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, and Herman Melville not only walked New York’s streets, they also wrote about them, as many have done since – as I am trying to do. More recently, William B. Helmreich, a sixty-eight-year-old professor of sociology at CUNY, walked almost every street in New York City: a hundred and twenty thousand blocks, or about six thousand miles.⁵

‘As you move through history, history moves into you, more surely than if you read it’

In Teju Cole’s first novel, Open City, walking the streets of New York appears, at first, to be an expression of engagement and curiosity for Julius, a Nigerian psychiatrist who wants to embrace his new home. Rousseau-like, Julius’s walks lead to a series of pronouncements and observations: on the flocking of birds, on failed relationships, on race, on class, and on history. But his digressions take on a bitter edge. Random observations and the rambling narrative structure that sustain them become attempts to erase the past, a past that includes a mistreatment of women. A meditation on gender is not where I intended to end up, but it is certainly one of the places Cole does. Sometimes there seems to be no way of escaping it even when all you want to do is walk, or read about walking. It was when doing the latter that I noticed this casual aside from The Art of Wandering, that the walker ‘remains, despite notable exceptions, predominantly male’. ⁶

I compare this bald statement with Rebecca Solnit’s exploration in Wanderlust of the ways in which women are discouraged from walking, the oft-cited concerns for safety that are motivated by a desire for control. She goes onto posit that, ‘Black men nowadays are seen as working-class women were a century ago: as a crim-inal category when in public.’ As I read her, I have a memory of a midnight walk one hot summer night, pacing down the middle of Nicholson Street, arms flung wide for no reason other than joy at being alive, the freedom of walking without scrutiny.

‘I have a memory of a midnight walk one hot summer night ... arms flung wide for no reason other than joy at being alive, the freedom of walking without scrutiny’

Walking provides an excellent opportunity to argue with people in your head, so I argue with Merlin Coverley, the author of that aside. I imagine telling him about Australia’s Sorrel Wilby who trekked through the Himalayas in 1991, wrote about that experience, and who has been walking ever since; of Lisa Dempster’s 1,200-kilometre walk through Japan and her book, Neon Pilgrim (2009). I remind him of Robyn Davidson’s extraordinary 3,000-kilometre pilgrimage through Australia’s deserts, enshrined in Tracks (1980), of Cheryl Strayed’s hike from Mexico to Canada, the subject of her bestseller, Wild (2012). Coverley, I say, do you not know of Charlotte Brontë and her creation Jane Eyre? ‘I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide.’ Of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, whose heroine Elizabeth Bennet walks everywhere, often unescorted, much to everyone’s consternation? ‘I do not wish to avoid the walk,’ she insists. ‘The distance is nothing when one has a motive; only three miles. I shall be back by dinner.’

My preoccupations collide in unexpected ways when I return from such a walk, and listen to a podcast on philosophy and extinction. In it the Australian environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren quotes a line from the feminist theorist Donna Haraway: ‘We need to “stay with the trouble”.’⁷

Walkers stay with the trouble. The Situationists called their walks dérives to distinguish between the unconscious act of strolling and their more politically charged way of moving through Parisian streets. Women march to reclaim the night. Between 1863 and 1881, William Barak, an elder of the Wurundjeri clan of the Woi wurrung people, walked the sixty kilometres from the Coranderrk Estate to the steps of parliament house some three times: to call for his people be paid for their labour; to seek the right for his people to have their own community; to insist on their freedom to keep their children within that community. A hundred years later, during the civil rights marches, African Americans attempted the fifty-four-mile walk from Selma to Montgomery on three occasions, despite the brutality of the beatings that battered down upon them. Here in New York, fifty years on, people are walking the streets, crossing the bridges, outraged by the fact policeman Daniel Pantaleo was not to stand trial for the choking of African American Eric Garner. ‘I can’t breathe,’ Garner had gasped. ‘I can’t breathe.’

There is so much trouble to stay with. Breathing becomes harder and harder. Can we stay with the trouble? Will the distance mean nothing if we have a motive? Can we, like Thoreau, make every walk a ‘crusade’, a reclamation of our cities, our lives, our land, our planet?

I think of the Horseshoe Crabs once more and come to realise that my attachment to them isn’t entirely random. In their plight I recognise our own. It is not just the crabs being left to float aimlessly in ruined seas. It is not just the dogs we live with, walk with, experiment upon, left to whine, to take the jolt. The knowledge of our undoing flickers, as if in the periphery of our vision, and such a flicker comes to me unbidden. I am in Kakadu National Park, in the Northern Territory, driving (not walking, it’s too hot) back to the campsite at South Alligator after dark. There is no moon. Dingoes race along the road’s embankment and keep pace, momentarily, with the car. They are powerful and pale. Wild. Endangered. Their paws move steadily over the red earth. Small fires lick all around us – it is burn-off time – and the flames light the dingoes’ way through this darkest of nights.

Footnotes

1. ‘The Woman Who Walked 10,000 Miles (No Exaggeration) in Three Years’, Elizabeth Weil, New York Times, 25 September 2014

2. Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit, Penguin Books, 2001

3. ‘Extinction: a matter of life and death?’, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC, 21 November 2014

4.‘Why are some depressed, others resilient? Scientists home in one part of the brain’, Meeri Kim, Washington Post, 5 June 2014

5. The New York Nobody Knows: Walking 6000 miles in the city, William B. Helmreich, Princeton University Press, 2013

6. The Art of Wandering: the Writer as Walker, Merlin Coverley, Old Castle Books, 2012


7. ‘Extinction: a matter of life and death?’, The Philosopher’s Zone, ABC, 21 November 2014

The Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay was created in 2007 and has become Australia’s premier essay prize. Originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund), Calibre is now funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC.

When/Was

Darling, set sail from all of this, forget
these drossy marshes, forget the artificial
beach, forget the eight-lane carriageway;
instead take perspective from the deep –
and then look back: see eagle at rest on falconer’s
wrist, streetscape whistling with velocity
and the towers gone up – always gone up –
every yesterday (when salt was an industry,
the shore was a sea, this ink-brush was
a weasel, my heart was a vein of ore)
as in the rock these waterlines rise up
concrete – and the sea, the sea recedes
to east … – Indeed, my darling, set sail,
wrest your vessel, navigate what used to be
land, witness skyscrapers, containers laded
trucking, commerce afloat on the vast silk tide:
take up your pen and codex, darling; take up
the theme of history; take up your library
catalogue: and look under yesterday (when
the book was a scroll, the cave was a firepit,
my foot was a tree’s root fed by salmon-
run phosphor) and follow time’s trails,
travails, through leaf bright pigment,
fold time’s corners to a kiss, set sail
from this; else turnabout, sweep ship
to shore once more where a drinking song –
a drink, a drink, one more drink – capsizes longing,
where constellations spell the future
and the street throws up the market past:
yes, calligraphers (their price gone up), noodle-
makers (their price gone up), stone carvers
(their price gone up), also the koi and temple,
yes, blue dreams of porcelain … But don’t
leave out, never leave out, the spit
brought up, the food slopped out, the ashes
stamped in doorways, don’t leave out
the plastic bottles sprung from mountain melt,
and everywhere the scaffolds, everywhere
new concrete pouring vertical, earth to sky, new
shadow cast on yesterday (when ink
was soot, when my bowl was a lakebed,
when my ribcage was the mess of brown rat’s
nest) and remember, too, the chaos is never
one thing, darling, because we came to see
a past and future both, we came to see a canal,
its thousand miles and more, to thread
the needle of its thousand years and more,
but all we could do was read figures in fine
china, read votive offers made in pink
of incense, read city’s unloading from the ships
that arrived yesterday (when my hair was burnt
grass, when this paper was a mulberry,
when the shadow puppet was a mule)
and yesterday (when needles were bone, when
the temple was a golden cup, when elegy
was a bud, when my fingernails were beeswax).
Now, instead, read the map that tells you, darling,
how large the ocean we’ve crossed and set sail
from this unbreachable difference – set sail from all
the grief of this laughter, take pearl and jade, take
clam and carpet, take salt grains and a handful
of sand imported yesterday (when autumn
was a volcano, when clay was a plastic, when my hip
pocket was a love letter) – and, darling, take shelter
in strange embassy, leeward, leave your mark,
remember this, remember all of this, remember
yesterday, yesterday – when your shoulder
was the comfort of the scent of steaming porridge.

Kate Middleton

As Wasps Fly Upwards

I’m walking home in the dying light of a summer’s day.
I do not know that within the minute
a tiny beetle will veer into my left eye,
its blade-like parts meant for slicing plant tissue,
slicing my cornea.
I do not know that within an hour
my eye will feel as though it has undergone a corneal graft
with razor blades, burning match heads
and acid rinses – Christmas eye, a doctor will call it.

I’m remembering this
because I’m reading about entomologist Justin Schmidt,
who once clung to a tree
suspended over a Costa Rican gorge
while enraged wasps squirted venom into his eyes;
a man stung by more winged insects than anyone,
who has classified all the piercing, irreverent,
bold, electric, smoky aches down to precise
decimal gradations
on a five-point Sting Pain Index.
I’ve also been reading a study that describes how Catholics
feel the ferocity of pain ease
if they contemplate images of Mary;
atheists if they watch documentaries
featuring David Attenborough – so I wonder,
when Schmidt steps on a nest of red harvester ants
and pain shoots like mordant dye through his body,
what angelic or analgesic image does he conjure
to demobilise the piercing, crunching agony;
or can he just sigh
and look into the distance and let his mind find relief
in the palliative cotton of wind-blown clouds?

I recall, once or twice in childhood, the pencil-point pressure
of a fang shooting an aggregation
of misery along my arm
as a spider discharged its voltage before dropping from my wrist
like decommissioned fuse wire.
And then there are the pangs that spasmodically flare
along the nerves on the underside of my upper right arm –
and I wonder if this is like the pain
Schmidt feels in his fingers
when digging up a colony of fire ants.

I remember, too, when an abundance of work and worry
has made my cranium feel as if it belonged
to a large-headed baby undergoing hours of obstructed labour.
Though perhaps if I’d been bitten by a bullet ant —
which Schmidt likens to fire-walking over flaming charcoal
with a three-inch rusty nail
grinding into your heel –   I might have a better point
of comparison and without hesitation
be grateful I’ve never had to invent a pain scale,
drawing and quartering metaphors for the way toxins
can burst open cellular membranes, or for the way
suffering can be internally transacted,
made dangerous and monstrous
by the fallacies of the self.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and remember
that death will come – perhaps, suddenly, from a tree
or an overhanging rock, or from a sliding shadow
in the grass; or from a knot of dark blood
bivouacking in my brain.
Or perhaps from a fever, my skin crawling
as though I were lying in the path of a horde of bull acacia ants;
or intense itching and burning as if I’d been
rubbed with a concoction of wasabi, hot mustard
and the necrotising venom of a white-tailed spider.
Or perhaps, just from a build-up over the years
of light, ephemeral stings –
barely noticed, no pain worth recording –
just a remote hum in a honey-vault of light
                                    then a smoky drifting away.

Judith Beveridge

Vantage

All the news is famine and famine.
‘A Woman Without A Country’, Eavan Boland

In the waiting rooms of the mornings
the empty chairs hold air. Women come
and go. Needles line the bins. The acrid
sterilisation of skin. The long, cold probe.

Outside the glass the city is laid out
like some ancient engraving enacted
from a conqueror’s vantage point.
The bridge is a miracle of engineering

spanning the headlands. Homes upon
homes, lives acting out behind walls,
under roofs, within bedrooms, inside bodies.
Where does the woman without a country

return to? For a human voice: the TV,
song, poetry. For touch: not even a cat.

Eileen Chong

Pitch and Yaw

After the wind arose and morphed invisibly
(in the way of winds) into a gale and then a hurricane,
she watched entranced as a house-roof was lifted
from the local kindergarten, an eighty-year-old
Californian bungalow, and levitated clean
as an empty carton into the soot-brown sky
to plunge into the next suburb. She observed a car,
admittedly a Beetle, bounce like arithmetic down
Yule Street, past a string of shops, and shatter
against the neighbourhood’s most ancient fig,
a Moreton Bay reputedly admired by Henry Parkes.
Momentarily it struck her that she must be dreaming,
or else dreaming that she was asleep and dreaming
this dream of not-dreaming – did that make sense?
A motorcycle shot past, at telegraph-pole height,
dropping like a plumbline onto the upholsterer’s
on Agnes Court. But then it stopped, the wind.
And sheepishly the inhabitants began to lean out
from behind their barricades, their terrible eyes
incredulous. Like her own, she supposed.
And yet through it all she sensed a febrile
detachment on her part, a dreamlike indifference.
She willed herself awake: nothing changed.
She pinched herself, and could feel the sting.
She walked towards Yule Street, rounded the corner
onto Carmunnock Drive and gaped in disbelief
at the sheer devastation. Worse than Tracy;
and for the first time she felt her head throbbing.
That was when the girl tugged at her coat.
No more than five or six, she was all atremble
and tears streamed down her freckled cheek.
‘Mummy, I can’t find our house,’ she wailed.
Gathering up the child, the woman began to run.
Down the unstreeted pathway, past the church –
now a blitzed silhouette – towards the playground,
where the donut carousel still turned, and beyond it
a swing on squealing chains, its pitch and yaw.

Alex Skovron

Floribunda

Noongah calendar for now is the appearance
of moodjar blossom, orange/yellow with dry sunshine.

For the invaders, let’s say, Christmas Tree. Maybe the few parleying
settlers of 1829 might have sensed a different cycle on those first

Christmases along the river and would have brightened
with its appearance, hemiparasitic, to drink the enriching fluids

of other trees. Seasonal decorations on farm gates, glitter and tinsel
in the headlights, sparklers in the tinder dry: armies of eyes.

Those searching haustoria of Nuytsia floribunda are like holidaymakers
and the Boxing Day lunch gathering at Wheatlands, year after year –

the networks of distance, the Avon Valley. Earlier today in Northam
I was swept up in the Christmas shopping avalanche, bare-handed,

weaving my way doggedly through wreaths of cigarette smoke,
the wheatbelt matter-of-fact g’day, howareya ... sorry, mate, it’s okay

exchange. Interlocutor, I wonder how little I write of the actual town,
this regional centre that’s remained a constant across my lifetime.

Troubled centre of a compass. The moodjar blossom is growing
infrequent with the reclearing of the clearings, the double-dipping

into the zones. Still, their cables reach out under us, and I say
sorry and g’day walking past familiar strangers, concrete

beneath our feet and the last crops being harvested out there.

John Kinsella

Toby Fitch

My first reaction on picking up Les Murray’s new collection, Waiting for the Past, was to note how handsomely produced it is, in hardback – a rare privilege for any book of poetry these days. The jacket image, a drawing of the portico of a stately house, in sepia tones, will be taken up later in one of the poems. A photograph of the author, also washed in sepia, occupies the back cover. Sepia is a virtual synonym for the past, and the intimations of lost time suggested by it, and by the title, are borne out in at least one strand of the book’s concerns.

Penguin Australia’s recent fiction output has been remarkable. Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals, Omar Musa’s Here Come the Dogs, and James Bradley’s Clade have all been idiosyncratic and inventive reads, bristling with energy and ideas. Steve Toltz’s Quicksand proves to be the cherry on the cake – a beguiling novel that confounds and astonishes in equal measure, often on the same page. Pity the unfortunate marketing department tasked with explaining this one. Part Chuck Palahniuk, part David Foster Wallace, part Thea Astley, and, really, so distinctly Toltzian, Quicksand chronicles the Sisyphean nightmare that is the life of one Aldo Benjamin, inventor, entrepreneur, and perennial loser.

Last month in Melbourne, a group of book reviewers and literary editors took part in a conference organised by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. There were more than thirty short papers, or ‘provocations’, as they were styled. Our Editor lamented the low or non-payment of some reviewers (especially younger ones) and announced a major new campaign to further increase payments to ABR contributors. Much good came from Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now. Book reviewers are a non-organised, often isolated class: Critical Matters pointed the way to a more united cohort. Hearteningly, the mood was invigorating – not rueful or defensive. To complement this symposium, we invited a number of the participants, and others, to respond to this question: ‘What single development would most improve the Australian critical culture?’

‘We are the children of death and it is death that rescues us from the deceptions of life.’
Sadeq Hedayat

Smoke fills the car as my friend Amir and I share a cigarette and hurtle down the highway from Tehran airport to the north of the gargantuan metropolis. Thin crowns of sunlight emerge from the shadowy horizon. The urban sprawl starts to line the highway. Traffic threads into the heaving mass. Unlike many Western cities, Tehran does not conform to the dichotomy of the centre and the periphery. It is the convergence of around twenty-one villages that have enmeshed and swallowed one another. It maps a series of separate yet endlessly entangled nervous systems, a geographical allusion to the multiplicity of contemporary Iranian life.

Despite the province of Tehran having a population that exceeds twelve million, the city streets at dawn are deserted. Curfews between midnight and six am are tightly adhered to. We find a small green-neon-lit breakfast shop pouring bowls of soup from a vat of boiled sheep heads. We shovel down fleshy chunks of mutton cheek. We roll sugar cubes in our mouths and sip tea. On a serviette, Amir writes down the numerals used in Farsi, 0–10: ۰, ۱, ۲, ۳, ۴, ۵, ۶, ۷, ۸, ۹, ۱۰. I flick through my passport and decode the date on my arrival stamp. The year is 1393.

This engaging but disturbing memoir describes Ramona Koval’s obsessive attempts to find herself another father than the one who had brought her up, the ‘Dad’ who was married to ‘Mama’. Dad and Mama, along with most of their circle in 1950s Melbourne, were Jewish immigrants from Poland, among the tens of thousands who came to Australia as displaced persons (DPs) after World War II. Ramona, their first child, was born in 1954, four years after their arrival in Australia; a sister arrived a few years later. While Yiddish was their first language, they spoke Polish to each other at home, but not to Koval and her sister, who grew up Australian, anxious (at least in Koval’s case) to conceal the family’s ‘dark rye’ home life from her ‘white-bread’ schoolfellows.

With her dark curly hair and broad shoulders, Koval didn’t look like any of her close family. Perhaps this was what set her off on the track of doubting that her legal father was her biological one. Of course, many children have fantasies of this kind. As an adolescent studying genetics, Koval noticed the anomaly that neither parent had her B positive blood type. When her mother shrugged it off, she didn’t pursue it. The doubts about her paternity came to the fore in Koval’s early twenties, when her mother was dying of leukaemia and Dad departed to live with another woman. The marriage had not been happy, and Dad and the new woman were much better suited. Moreover, Dad, an emotional man given to fits of sobbing, couldn’t stand illness and death. Koval, while conceding these points, didn’t forgive him.

Since the loss of Lake Pedder, the Apple Isle has been the site of some of Australia’s most famous environmental battles: Franklin River, Farmhouse Creek, Wesley Vale, Styx Valley. In the Tamar Valley near Launceston, tensions continue to simmer over the future of the Gunns Pulp Mill – even in the wake of the collapse of its original proponent, Gunns Ltd, in September 2012. That Gunns and its demise still cast such a long shadow over Tasmanian politics speaks to the island’s past, present, and future. The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd is political scientist Quentin Beresford’s attempt to understand just how this came to be.

The Tasmanian thirst for economic development, Beresford argues, allowed ambitious and ruthless characters such as Robin Gray, Edmund Rouse, John Gay, and Jim Bacon to flourish and rise to power at the expense of democratic process and the island’s forests. A Tasmanian himself, Beresford is only too familiar with these excesses of developmentalism, having written extensively about its expressions in his adopted state of Western Australia. In The Salinity Crisis (2001), Beresford showed the toll of the postwar government’s pledge to clear ‘a million acres a year’, which spread the scourge of dryland salinity across the state’s wheatbelt. Just as this form of developmentalism waned, another emerged in its place as the WA Inc. scandal engulfed the state governments of the 1980s, which Beresford examined in his book The Godfather: The Life of Brian Burke (2008).

‘There’s a greater problem here. This is a president who won’t proudly proclaim American exceptionalism, maybe the first president ever who truly doesn’t believe in that … Look at his foreign policy. Doesn’t believe [in] America as a force for good, it doesn’t seem. Seems like instead, he believes in multilateralism as a goal, not a tactic. He allows foreign capitals to have veto power over our foreign policy.’

So claimed Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in February this year, criticising President Barack Obama. This is a sentiment expressed often by Jindal’s fellow Republicans, a talking point on Fox News. Never mind that the president has declared his belief in the exceptional place of America in the world on many occasions. Obama has failed to state that the United States is a nation unlike any other in history. Exceptionalism becomes a proxy for patriotism, a way of implying that Obama is not sufficiently American.

In one sense, Jindal is right: Obama is sceptical that the United States has a special purpose and mission in the world. Though proud of the United States, Obama recognises that other nations might equally celebrate their values. This fails the Republican test, itself an expression of a deep current in American thinking.

‘For our house is our corner of our world … If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)

Houses, and their domestic spaces of intimacy and negotiation, sit at the core of Helen Garner’s early fiction. Most often they are large, communal houses in Melbourne’s Carlton or Fitzroy, places where a generation of youngish countercultural musicians, artists, and wounded souls challenge the accepted rules of sexual relationships and attempt to redefine what might constitute family. In the kitchens and bedrooms of Monkey Grip (1977), Honour and Other People’s Children (1980), and Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), Garner’s characters wrestle with their passions and ideals. The new patterns of living that they establish offer, particularly for the women, a sense of liberating possibility beyond marriage and childrearing, but that freedom is coupled with compromise and loss. In The Children’s Bach (1984), Garner shifts her focus to the suburban household of a married couple. In this novella, she both critiques and celebrates the burdens of responsibility and commitment.

The critically acclaimed Monkey Grip had drawn fire from a raft of (largely male) critics, who railed against Garner’s style and subject matter. She was pilloried for working from her journal and for writing from a female perspective about private matters: emotions, sex, interior lives. Following the publication of Honour and Other People’s Children, she was again criticised for focusing on domestic situations rather than ‘larger areas of the normal’. Indeed, Anne Summers was bored by Garner’s ‘fine-etching of the emotions, without reference to any external events’, wishing instead that she would ‘open the front door and move out a little into the world’. In The Children’s Bach, Garner burrows deeply into the domestic space of the Fox family’s home, before throwing the doors wide open to the destabilising influences of the world beyond. The house itself becomes almost porous, a membrane through which various characters pass. Yet something solid remains at its core.

The Children's Bach (Penguin first edition, 1986)

Buy this bookDexter Fox is a principled, gregarious, opinionated man. He and his wife Athena are lovers and friends. They live a fairly mundane, contented life in Bunker Street caring for their two sons, Arthur and Billy. Billy has a form of autism, which places an added burden on family relations. Until Dexter’s old friend Elizabeth and her lover Philip come into their life, the Foxes remain quarantined from the underworld, or the other world, of nightclubs, drugs, and extramarital sex. Athena runs a fairly peaceful, functioning household. She washes, cleans, irons, and gossips contentedly with friends, but she is suffocating in a house whose doors are never locked. She fantasises about escape (yet even in those fantasies she dreams of the fabulous curtains she would sew).

In the novella’s extraordinary opening paragraph, Garner describes a photograph of Lord Alfred Tennyson and his family. In a 1993 interview, she admitted to having found this photograph well into her research and being struck by the body language of the subjects. The photograph seemed to echo her concerns. Here was a confident patriarch, his seemingly subservient wife and two sons, one with a distant, contrary perspective. So, on one level, the dynamics of this group map nicely onto the Fox family unit. Dexter has stuck this photograph to the kitchen wall. It is tattered and grease-stained, but every time it threatens to slip off the wall completely, ‘someone saves it, someone sticks it back’. From the outset, therefore, Garner suggests that the Fox family, though it may be battered and bruised, will persevere. Her use of this particular photograph, however, is just one of the many shorthand strategies she employs to imbue this novella with depth and complexity.

‘The critically acclaimed Monkey Grip had drawn fire from a raft of (largely male) critics, who railed against Garner’s style and subject matter’

It was Tennyson who wrote ‘The Lady of Shalott’, that great Victorian poem about female entrapment and the sacrifice required of women artists. So at a time when second-wave feminism was enjoying ascendancy in Australia, Garner – through her choice of photograph – invited readers to consider how far women have really progressed since Victorian times. Like Tennyson’s ‘Lady’, Athena tinkers with her art, removed from the outside world. Like Tennyson’s ‘Lady’, she too will be tempted from her isolated, unadventurous existence into a world of risk and uncertainty.

Athena operates as a modern-day ‘Angel in the House’, a term coined by the poet Coventry Patmore (1823–96), to describe women in the Victorian era:

Confined to the home, women were expected to be domestic, innocent, and utterly helpless when matters outside the home were concerned. Not only was the home where women would be protected from the dangers of the outside world, it was also where they could keep their innocence and be a beacon of morality for their husbands.

Dexter insists that Athena is a ‘saint’ and that she is lured away by Philip because she is ‘naïve’. Philip’s daughter Poppy thinks she is ‘perfect’. To Elizabeth’s young sister Vicki, she seems ‘contained, without needs, never restless’. Meanwhile, Athena’s shoulders ‘tremble with holding back’.

The Children's Bach (Penguin international edition, 1986)

Buy this bookMusic, as language, metaphor, and lived experience, infuses this narrative. Each character has a unique approach to music, in its various forms, which reflects their personality and their relationships with each other. For example, Dexter’s booming ‘dramatic baritone’ demands an audience and dwarfs Athena’s attempt at musical expression. In private she ‘picks away at Bartók’s Mikrokosmos or the easiest of Bach’s Small Preludes’, in turn exhilarated and abashed by her attempts. Garner herself had her first piano lesson when she was forty, a few years before she wrote The Children’s Bach. Speaking to Sue Woolfe and Kate Grenville in 1993, she noted that learning the piano made her aware of ‘the almost moral struggle that playing music entails’.Like Athena, Garner struggled timidly with the piano keys, striving ‘to perceive form, to establish order’. So too in her writing she pares back, edits and structures her narrative so that it reads seamlessly as an easily accessible domestic drama, while offering the reader a deeply textured, powerful consideration of ethical relations. Philip makes this link between writing and music obvious when he advises the young songwriter to ‘Take out the clichés … Just leave in the images … Make gaps … Don’t explain everything. Leave holes. The music will do the rest.’

‘Music, as language, metaphor, and lived experience, infuses this narrative’

The novella’s title is taken from a primer of keyboard music, edited by E. Harold Davies, in whose opening pages we read: ‘Polyphony: which is the combining together of many melodies – requires first and foremost, a sure instinct for each individual part.’ Through short vignettes Garner simultaneously provides access to each character’s thoughts and voice. As Don Anderson has suggested, Garner ‘weaves her characters’ loves and lives together … in a way that Papa Bach would have recognised as contrapuntal’.

Garner has credited the women’s movement for giving her the licence to write about ‘what happens in people’s houses’ rather than more obviously political or historical topics, like ‘The War or that kind of thing: huge subjects, mighty things’. The politics of human, and of gendered, relations informs the drama of The Children’s Bach. Athena, Vicki, Elizabeth, Poppy, and old Mrs Fox represent, in various ways, female experience, opportunity, and expectation. They exist in a world where ‘men fuck girls without loving them. Girls cry in the lavatories’; a world where women are sexually harassed on buses and denigrated through obscene humour. But they also exist in a world – unknown and abhorrent to Dexter – where the ‘rules’ of ‘modern life’ allow them sexual freedom and personal liberty.

The Children's Bach (Penguin, 1999 edition)

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Dexter, for all his old-fashioned ideas and domineering style, is a very likeable character. Indeed, Garner has commented that The Children’s Bach demonstrated a significant change in her writing about relationships between men and women, ‘because there is a male character capable of love, which I hadn’t been able to think about before’. Garner sets up a powerful contrast between the solid, righteous Dexter and the amoral, unreliable Philip. Significantly, both men are caring fathers, but Dexter’s commitment to his wife and children, particularly Billy, contrasts with Philip’s casual availability to Poppy and to women generally. Both men are desirable in very different ways. Ultimately, Athena’s sexual attraction to Philip and the world he represents, cannot be repressed.

In a spare and moving scene, Elizabeth offers Philip to Athena: ‘Their fingers met formally at the high corners of the sheet. Elizabeth’s relinquished, Athena’s accepted. As they folded, as they spoke, the light left the garden.’ With Philip, Athena thinks: ‘Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences.’ And so she abandons Dexter, her sons and her home to go with Philip to Sydney. Yet, in her freedom there is loss: ‘She walks the city feeling like a tourist, aware ‘that the day without duty passes with the slowness of a dream.’ Sydney is represented as a nightmare landscape. Like the family’s pet rabbit, once domesticated Athena cannot survive in the wider world. Dexter follows her and pleads for her to come home, but she is not yet ready. A shattered Dexter returns to Melbourne alone and at the end of a drunken evening makes love to Vicki only to wake up in a blaze of self-disgust. No one, in Garner’s world, is beyond reproach. But neither are they judged.

Marriage, life, and playing music are all complex tasks requiring dedication and hard work. In an early scene where Athena is patronised and humiliated by Dexter and Vicki for her lack of musical talent, Elizabeth remarks: ‘The Children’s Bach. God, listen to this – how pompous. “Bach is never simple, but that is one reason why we should all try to master him.”’ We can substitute ‘life’ and ‘marriage’ for ‘Bach’ in that sentence. Elizabeth exhorts Athena to ‘Show us how you’ve mastered him’, but at that point, she has not.

The Children's Bach (Penguin, 2008 edition)

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At a time of her choosing, Athena returns to her husband, children and messy home. It is a conscious choice and is a cause for celebration. She sets about restoring domestic order as only she can, finally sitting down at the kitchen table and waiting for her family to come home. Garner concludes the novella with an exceptional sentence in the future continuous tense, a sentence that sweeps up the many fragmentary strands of the novella into a vision of hope. Hope does not, however, translate to facile romanticism. Athena will be reconciled to Dexter, and to life with Dexter, but she will also ‘dream again and again, against her will, of Philip, or rather of not-Philip’. Female desire cannot and should not be quashed. Somehow, Garner suggests, desire needs to be reconciled within a marriage.

Davies’ edited volume of The Children’s Bach (1933) opens with ‘A Song of Resignation’ and closes with ‘A Song of Love’. So too, Garner concludes her novella with a song of love, a song about the complexity of married love and the conscious compromises such a love might entail: both the steady left hand of duty and the soaring right hand of joyous potential:

and Athena will play Bach on the piano, in the empty house, and her left hand will keep up the steady rocking beat, and her right hand will run the arpeggios, will send them flying, will toss handfuls of notes high into the sparkling air!

That final sentence proclaims not only Athena’s growing confidence; it also declares Garner’s assured sense of herself, finally, as a writer.

References
Anderson, Don. ‘A Tale of Modern Love: The Children’s Bach’, Hot Copy: Reading and Writing Now (1986).
Bach, Johann Sebastian. The Children’s Bach. Edited by E. Harold Davies (1933).
Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas (1992/1958).
Grenville, Kate and Sue Woolfe. Making Stories: How ten Australian novels were written (1993).
Rogers, Shelagh. ‘Interview with Helen Garner’. Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada Vol.1 (1989).
Summers, Anne. ‘Review of Honour and Other People’s Children’, cited in Anderson.
‘The Angel in the House’, Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Context.

Which poets have most influenced you?

Countless contemporary Australian poets, Tomas Tranströmer, Weldon Kees, Elizabeth Bishop. I could go on, but it’s not just poets. I would love to write a poem as ‘poetic’ as Michelangelo Antonioni’s films. I wish I could be as funny as Pierre Étaix. And there is the fiction of Tove Jansson or Lydia Davis. And I’ve listened to Brian Eno for thirty-five years, which must have had an effect. (While Eno isn’t really known for his lyrics, I love the lyrical minimalism of songs like ‘By This River’).

In ‘Birthday Poem at Thirty’, a young David Malouf considers his place in the scheme of things as dawn breaks over an unnamed and unlovely ‘northern town’. The poet, who seems dislodged from home, regards himself with a dry eye – ‘no visible scars / no medals’ – and wonders where he will go from here, and how far. ‘Far indeed’, is the answer life offers fifty years later. The scars are a private matter but there are literary medals enough for this eighty-one-year-old ‘smiling public man’. The most elusive prize of all – a Nobel laurel – perhaps awaits Malouf. He would not be undeserving.

The Brisbane-born writer has continued to write poetry, but it is the novels that have brought him international renown. The core Australian tales – among them Johnno, Conversations at Curlow Creek, Fly Away Peter, Harland’s Half Acre, Remembering Babylon – may even have helped to forge, after Joyce’s injunction, ‘the uncreated conscience’ of his race, or at least the male portion of it. Malouf’s abiding theme – the refractions of nature and culture through the conundrum of masculine identity – is one of the great Australian stories.

Random House has of late been hoovering up his ephemeral non-fiction for more permanent life between hard covers. Being There, third in the series, is focused on art, music, and architecture. Its first section includes short studies, addresses, and meditations, while the second pulls together two libretti, Voss and Mer de Glace, and a version of Hippolytus by Euripides.

Calibre Prize

Sophie Cunningham is the winner of this year’s Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay. The judges – Delia Falconer and Peter Rose – chose Ms Cunningham’s essay from a field of almost 100 essays. She receives $5,000 from ABR.

Our winner is well known to Australian readers as a former publisher, Editor of Meanjin, and Chair of the Literature Board. She has published two novels as well as Melbourne (in the Cities series) and Warning: The Story of Cyclone Tracy.

‘Staying with the Trouble’ covers very different terrain from that of Martin Thomas’s and Christine Piper’s celebrated Calibre-winning essays: ‘“Because it’s your country”: Bringing Back the Bones to West Arnhem Land’ (2013) and ‘Unearthing the Past’ (2014), which dealt with historical wrongs and biological horrors, respectively. In her essay, Sophie Cunningham (pictured opposite and on our front cover) describes an epic walk up Broadway in New York, and others like it. The tone is self-deprecating, conversational, and ‘gloriously social’, but all sorts of themes arise along the way: Alzheimer’s, Horseshoe Crabs, history, writers, violence against women, racism, Selma, and climate change. It is a celebration of ‘randomness’, but also testifies to Sophie Cunningham’s belief in the importance of ‘staying with the trouble’.

On learning that she had won the Calibre Prize, Sophie Cunningham, who recently moved from Brooklyn to San Francisco, told Advances: 'I wrote this essay with no expectations, from a concern with how one narrates the personal and fragmented while chronicling issues as broad as climate change and mass extinction. I had become obsessed with walking and needed a deadline. The Calibre Prize has rewarded a rich variety of writers who have tackled an extraordinary range of topics. Each year I’ve read the winner and been inspired. I feel incredibly honoured to now be among these winners’ number.’ 

This is the ninth time that ABR has offered the Calibre Prize, which is intended to advance the essay form in this country. We look forward to offering Calibre again in 2016, and we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Mr Colin Golvan QC.

Porter Prize

Six poets have been shortlisted for the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. They are: Judith Beveridge, Eileen Chong, Toby Fitch, John Kinsella, Kate Middleton, and Alex Skovron (who won the Porter Prize in 2007). The shortlisted poems can be read here. Our three judges – Lisa Gorton, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose – selected them from an overall field of about 600 poems.

Join us for the prize ceremony at Collected Works Bookshop, Melbourne, on Tuesday, 12 May (6 pm), where we will introduce our shortlisted poets (or their representatives). This is a free event, but bookings are essential. To book please call ABR on (03) 9699 8822 or email us This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

ABR in London

ABR is pleased to be involved in the second Australian and New Zealand Festival of Literature and Arts in London this month. The Festival takes place at King’s College from 28 to 31 May. Australian participants will include Peter Carey, Li Cunxin, and Kate Grenville. There will be more than forty events. Among the themes are nature and the environment, the arts and science, travel and adventure, and the two world wars.

Peter Rose will be involved in two sessions, reading from his poetry and chairing a session called ‘War in Writing’ with British poet and novelist Ruth Padel and New Zealand poet laureate Vincent O’Sullivan.

May in Canberra

Budgets aside, it will be a good month for oratory in Canberra. The National Library of Australia is hosting two public lectures by distinguished novelists.

Andrea Goldsmith will deliver the Ray Mathew Lecture. Her theme is ‘Private Passions, Public Exposure’. The date is Thursday, 14 May (6 pm). Ms Goldsmith will repeat the Lecture for ABR at Boyd on Wednesday, 5 August, and at Flinders University on Friday, 9 October.

Frank Moorhouse will deliver the Colin Simpson Lecture on Saturday, 23 May (11.30 am). His Lecture, presented in association with the Australian Society of Authors, is titled ‘Does the Imagination Have Ethics?’

Both of these are free events, but bookings are essential. To book please call ABR on (03) 9699 8822 or email us This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Environment issue

Award-winning author Ashley Hay is the 2015 ABR Dahl Trust Fellow. Her long article, ‘The Forest at the Edge of Time’ will examine ‘what our mongrel trees tell us about our past, the present, and the future’. It will appear in this year’s Environment issue (October). Ashley Hay has published several books, including Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions (2002), The Railwayman’s Wife (2013), which won the Colin Roderick Award, and (as editor) Best Australian Science Writing 2014.

Nature Conservancy

The third biennial Nature Conservancy Australian Nature Writing Prize, worth $5,000, has five writers on its shortlist: Nick Gadd, Hayley Katzen, Kim Mahood, Cathy Mauk, and Tony Spencer-Smith. The Prize is for an essay that the judges (Jesse Blackadder and Robert Gray) think ‘best explores how a writer relates to and interacts with some aspect of the Australian landscape’.

The winner will be announced on Thursday, 14 May, and the successful essay will be published in our Environment issue – a new partnership for ABR.

Given the plethora of non-fiction books about Virginia Woolf and her circle, ranging from biographies to memoirs to coffee-table offerings of all kinds, it is tempting to wonder why we need novels as well. For intimacy and immediacy we have the Bloomsberries’ own accounts of themselves in the many voluminous editions of their letters and diaries, not to mention portraits, photographs, and autobiographical works. But somehow it is not enough. We want not just to learn about their lives but to participate in them, and for this, it seems, we must turn to fiction.

Two new novels about Woolf promise much in this regard. Priya Parmar’s book, like Susan Sellers’s 2008 novel Vanessa and Virginia, focuses on Woolf’s older sister, the painter Vanessa Bell. It begins in 1905, when Virginia was twenty-three and Vanessa twenty-six and they were still the unknown Stephen sisters. Following the death of their father, Leslie Stephen, they and their brothers, Thoby and Adrian, have moved from their stultifying home in Kensington to the slightly disreputable, inner-London locale of Bloomsbury, where they seek to throw off convention and live to please themselves. It is an inherently dramatic situation – the very birthplace of the Bloomsbury legend – but instead of creating scenes that will transport us there, Parmar presents a series of entries purporting to be from Vanessa’s diaries, supplemented by occasional letters from her friends.

‘What’s your favourite way water can be?’, eight-year-old Em asks her father Merv. Em likes waterfalls, but Merv prefers floods. A flood, he explains to Em, ‘is a type of flat waterfall you can ride on. But it’s serious too. It knows where it’s going and it’s determined to get there.’

Mervyn Rossiter, the exasperating, endearing larrikin hero of writer Anson Cameron’s fifth novel, The Last Pulse, delivers this lesson just before dynamiting a dam at Karoo Station in south-east Queensland. In doing so, he unleashes a cleansing flood of retribution to make the water thieves from Queensland understand the pain their irrigation policy is causing those who live downstream. This includes men like Merv, a wine-grower in South Australia, whose livelihood disappeared when the water stopped flowing. Aboard a stolen party punt named The Party Animal, Em and Merv ride the water back home. In the course of their journey, they pick up a few passengers: Bridget Wray, the agitated Queensland minister for the environment, who found herself inelegantly stranded on a portaloo when the dam blew, and Barwon, an indigenous teenager from central New South Wales, who believes that he sang the water back into the dry riverbed.

Mattheüs (Mattie) Duiker is a thirty-something gay man with a chequered past and an addiction to porn. His Afrikaans father, Bennie, is a self-made man, a larger-than-life uber-masculine traditionalist who has forever cast a shadow over his family. Bennie is dying from terminal cancer, and Mattie is his primary carer. Mattie, desperate to make something of his life, sets out to create a business, but his dependence on his father for the capital to do so, and the legacy of their fraught relationship, hinder his attempts at independence. Mattie’s boyfriend, Jack, a popular housemaster in an affluent boys’ college, comes from an impoverished background with a previous drug addiction and debts to dealers hanging over him. Jack is a compulsive Facebook user; the book is punctuated by status updates that offer a shorthand insight into his relationship with Mattie.

If it were up to Roy Ellis, the town-proud editor-in-chief of Dungower’s only newspaper, ‘paedophilia would be systematically bred out of humans’. That just about sums up the attitudes of his readers, who are disgusted to learn that there is a convicted child sex offender living among them in rural Victoria. Only when Ellis’s maverick reporter Joni Miller refuses to let go of the case which threatens to mar the town’s otherwise wholesome reputation does a more nuanced response begin to form.

Peter Twohig’s The Torch recaptures the tone and narrative structure of its prequel, The Cartographer (2012). The earlier novel is superficially an adventure story. With recurrent allusions to Tom Sawyer (1876) and Kim (1901), the plot alternates between schoolboy pranks and perilous situations. However, these adventures are tinged with pathos. Many of the events described by the unnamed protagonist are deliberately implausible. An underprivileged child is attempting to gain control over traumatic experiences including the death of his twin brother, whose name, significantly, was Tom, and the separation of his parents. He re-imagines the world with himself as the centre, the cartographer, seeing and knowing all, performing audacious rescues, and aiding and abetting a network of professional spies.

If I ask myself why I write about lakes
(again and again the task of keeping on course)
I think how the lake veers and veers, always left –
I start that way, land bulked on my right
for my abler hand to be sure, eye and the witless
other hand still feeling, open to water,
half-trained, shaping and stopping intervals on rounded
strings sounding in the mind till the right hand
takes and makes it music. The view from the lake road.

If I were to write down a list
of everything I miss I’d miss
the most important thing,
an irregular pearl. Not gifts –
books on corvids, Wild Lone,
‘Ballad of Gordon, Alpha Cock,
who clawed to death a fox
and Bedlington terrier’ – or this

Privacy is dead, or so it is regularly pronounced. There are many suspects: big government; big business; the media; social media; technology; us, for giving of ourselves too readily and allowing our privacy to shrivel and die. Even if privacy is not yet dead, it is said to be under threat on multiple fronts.

The most recent threat is the mandatory data retention legislation, passed by the Commonwealth Parliament with bipartisan support. Concerns about the privacy of individuals making phone calls, searching the Internet, sending emails and acting as sources for journalists were ultimately subordinated to concerns about national security.

There is no real political appetite among the major parties to protect privacy in Australia. This contrasts sharply with the interest law reform bodies have shown in the issue of privacy. In the last seven years, the Australian Law Reform Commission has twice investigated the issue of privacy. The law reform commissions in New South Wales and Victoria have also reported on privacy. Their recommendations have largely been neglected by legislatures. In response to the first ALRC report, the Gillard government released an issues paper on whether Australia should introduce a statutory cause of action for serious invasion of privacy. After receiving submissions, it decided to do nothing itself, but rather commissioned the ALRC to provide another report. Before the ALRC had submitted its second report, the new attorney-general, Senator George Brandis, dismissed out of hand the need for any such cause of action.

It is sometimes easy to forget that Barack Obama ascended from the Illinois state senate to the presidency of the United States in just over four years. It was a steep rise – exhilarating and unprecedented. Since assuming office in January 2009, the road has been rockier, and it is Obama’s seven years in office that form the subject of Chuck Todd’s The Stranger. The title of the book refers to Obama’s perceived estrangement from the establishment and institutions of Washington, DC. Todd is well placed to make the assessment, as a former White House correspondent and political director for the cable news network MSNBC and current host of NBC’s Meet the Press – a storied Sunday morning talk show.

The Stranger, which begins during the transition period in late 2008 and ends on the eve of the 2014 mid-term elections, gives an account of Obama’s early legislative battles, his efforts to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and to kill Osama bin Laden), the 2012 re-election campaign, and some of the administration’s more recent stumbles. Through this history, Todd seeks to illustrate the president’s weakness as a political operator and his temperamental unsuitability to the job. Obama, Todd argues, was elected to ‘fix’ Washington – a task voters entrusted to him because of his unique story, his outsider status, and his considerable talents. In the end, however, Todd concludes that ‘the grand change Obama promised has not come to pass’.

DENNIS POTTER – THE REAL AUTEUR

Dear Editor,

While history and memory and the memory of history all seem to get shorter and shorter every decade, it’s a little surprising that neither James McNamara’s informative essay (ABR, April 2014), nor one of your commentators, could have found space for even a brief mention of the one writer for television who really does deserve the term auteur – Dennis Potter.

In the opening pages of his memoir, Herbie Hancock recounts an onstage episode in Stockholm in the mid-1960s, when he was playing with Miles Davis. In a few brief paragraphs, he sums up Davis’s genius as only a musician deeply conversant with his music could. It is this sort of privileged entrée into Hancock’s musical world that makes Possibilities a worthy addition to jazz literature.

‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master,’ Elizabeth Bishop once famously wrote; ‘So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster.’ Much modern technology seems designed specifically to counter this natural human propensity towards loss. We have key rings that respond obediently to their owner’s whistle, immediately disclosing their location. We have iPhones to remind us of the title of that book we have just been reading, the name of the old friend we have just run into, the number of that bus that takes us home. Memory, once regarded as a human attribute, is now a term associated primarily with the computer. Yet for all these mechanical props and aids, we go on losing things just as we did before.

The same anxieties, the same paradoxes, were keenly felt in the early modern theatre. Play scripts were fragile objects, notoriously subject to damage, dispersal, and loss. The art they represented must often have seemed ephemeral in nature, even the most popular of plays ultimately vanishing at times without trace, like the scenes that Prospero describes at the conclusion of The Tempest, melting ‘into air, into thin air’. The new technology seemed (as it does today) to offer security against such losses, as printed playbooks began to emerge from the newly established publishing houses of London: at first in cheapish quarto editions and, as time went by, in more costly and imposing folio format. It is through the survival into modern times of so many of these printed play texts that we have some sense, however imperfect, of the richness of the age of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe.

We live in a world obsessed with self-images. Thanks to digital photography and the Internet, we can all star in and manipulate the drama of our lives. But, as James Hall reminds us, artists have been experimenting with self-representation for centuries. From a quartzite stela of Pharaoh Akhenaten’s court sculptor Bak standing with his wife Taheri (c.1350 bce) to Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95, which featured a tent, a mattress, and 102 appliquéd names, self-portraitists have always manipulated the way they have wanted to be seen, and have reflected or rejected prevailing mores and morals. More prosaically, most artists have made a self-portrait at one time or another, using themselves as models (for economic reasons) as a way of recording a gesture or to create a character.

While Hall draws a long bow in his inclusion of the obscure and the highly conceptual, his study, Egyptians aside, is firmly rooted in the Western Classical and Christian tradition. Saint Augustine wrote about the mirror of scripture and how the Bible showed both the divine plan and the path by which individuals could reform themselves; artists put themselves in the picture, often religious ones, to show their piety and also their temporal fidelity as courtiers to the rich and powerful.

It seems unlikely that anyone ever emerged from the performance of an O’Neill play saying happily, ‘Laugh! I nearly died.’ Robert M. Dowling’s fine biography helps to account for this: the life behind the writing of those plays was not conducive to a hilarious outcome. To have survived the life he lived would have been remarkable enough, let alone turning out some of the century’s most searing dramas.

For some, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) remains one of the unforgettable theatrical experiences. Two moments remain indelibly fixed on my mind. One features sixty-three-year-old Laurence Olivier as James Tyrone in Michael Blakemore’s 1971 production. His Tyrone, always complaining of wasted electricity, is cautiously standing on a table to change a light bulb, then jumps off it backwards, capturing the former matinée idol’s bravado along with his age and parsimony. The other was of the great actress Gwen Ffrangcon-Davies, in the 1958 London production, as drug-dimmed Mary Tyrone, who enters in the play’s last moments with her wedding dress over her arm, saying quietly: ‘Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’

As I sit by the fire, a gale rackets at the door and horizontal sleet sheets across my windows. With monster snowfalls in the Alps, the weather is breaking records again. Each winter, the winds are stronger, rains heavier, and temperatures lower than ever before. I put more wood on the fire and consider my investment in double-glazing well-spent.

In our protected and privileged suburban lives, this is as close as we come to considering the consequences of climate change. Weather variation and minor coastal erosion mark the limits of our lived experience. No matter the forecasts of scientists, our psychological response to climate change is the same as it is to all distant predictions of doom (heart disease, car accident). Whatever the odds, it probably won’t happen to us and it probably won’t be all that bad. What harm in a few degrees of temperature or centimetres of sea level?

If you had asked anyone in the 1780s where in Europe a revolution was most likely to break out, the answer would probably have been Britain. Paris was too strictly policed to be a candidate, whereas London had recently been the scene of violent anti-Catholic riots. The British were an unruly people, as Jenny Uglow’s book on British life during the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars testifies. Treason trials, food riots in the terrible winter of 1795, riots against the press gangs, and mutinies in the navy all encouraged a fear of domestic revolution. The country was threatened by terrorist attacks. The Despard conspiracy of 1802 planned to seize the Tower and murder George III and, in 1812, Prime Minister Perceval was shot dead. In response, civil liberties were curtailed and the rule of law suspended. In Uglow’s account, this was a society in conflict with itself, violent, riotous, and repressive.

Uglow presents a panoramic view of British society at war, through the eyes of a range of individuals from different social backgrounds: clergymen, soldiers, artisans, bankers, weavers, farmers, and their wives. She calls this a ‘crowd biography’, which is misleading since her crowd never solidifies into common action; it is rather a cast of disparate individuals who qualify because of their letters and diaries. Uglow darts from one to another at such lightning speed, over sixty short chapters, that she creates a scatter-gun effect, in which no one in her ‘crowd’ is presented in the round and none lingers long in the memory. Her account is teeming with details and anecdotes, piled relentlessly on top of one another. This is history by immersion.

Creativity is always an exercise in recycling. Vision comes from revision. In the ancient world, such wisdom was institutionalised; the task of the poet was to powerfully exploit a cultural storehouse of existing plots. Thus the early Greek playwrights reworked the same complex of myths. However, stories are inexhaustible, something that Scheherazade, in another ancient text, teaches us. Certainly, Greek myth continues to be a rich source of inspiration. Over millennia, writers, artists, composers – even psychoanalysts – have returned to the material of the Greek poets. Translators of the Greek classics form part of this revisionary and creative enterprise.

Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians, translated by the Canadian Ancient Greek scholar and poet Anne Carson, returns to the tragic story of the House of Atreus. According to that story, summarised at the start of this play, Agamemnon sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis in order to cure ‘the disaster of windlessness’ that befell his ship as he set sail for Troy. The distraught Clytemnestra then murdered her husband upon his return from the war; he had compounded Clytemnestra’s grief over the loss of her daughter by returning with a mistress (Cassandra). Subsequently Clytemnestra’s son Orestes (with help from his sister Electra) murdered his mother to avenge his father.

Father of democracy or nepotic would-be tyrant, corrupting the citizens with flattery and handouts? Brilliant orator, fearlessly committed to the truth, or dangerous sophist saying whatever the mob wanted to hear? Effective administrator of a complex and benevolent empire or cruel curtailer of the allies’ liberties? A model of sobriety and chastity or a lecherous adulterer living with a treacherous foreign whore? Pick your Pericles. There is plenty of support for all the above and more in the ancient sources. By and large, the positive view stems from Thucydides (and goes in and out of fashion along with the historian), while the negative has a wide range of advocates, including comic poets and philosophers. Centuries later, Plutarch reconciled the accounts by making them sequential – a tale of Pericles Redeemed.

The difficulties in making sense of these sources and later commentators has led Vincent Azoulay to conclude, wisely enough, that a large part of a biography of Pericles should be devoted to historiography. His first chapter assesses the ancient sources and the last two examine what has happened to Pericles’ reputation since the time he was so unremembered that Shakespeare presented him as an eastern prince best known for undertaking his own Odyssey. The Renaissance accorded him a ‘timid burst of acclaim’, Machiavelli thought he was incompetent, Montaigne called him a sophist, and Abbé Barthélemy tore him to shreds. The French revolutionaries preferred to draw their lessons from Rome and Sparta. Pericles made a comeback with the flowering of German scholarship in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, his contributions to Athenian buildings, oratory, and democracy being seen as the embodiment of the Greek miracle. Fans ranged from Frederick II to Hegel. A revival of interest in Thucydides helped spread this more positive impression in France, and for a time Periclean Athens was seen as a blueprint for Victorian England. Both Churchill and Hitler admired his charisma and investment in infrastructure, though the latter was rather more taken with Sparta. Books demonising Pericles still appear regularly, but the official version taught in schools is rather anodyne. He is one of the few ancient heroes to be ignored by the video games industry.

Jean Findlay had access to an impressive array of sources when writing this biography of her great-great uncle. She does not always make the best choices in navigating the mass of material: too many pages are cluttered with unsifted detail, and the family history genre often interferes with the biographical project of a significant public figure. However, the multiplicity of authentic documents – letters, poems, notes, diaries – allows Charles Scott Moncrieff to emerge as a vital, brilliant, conflicted whirlwind of a man whose courage in war, devotion to friends and family, and profound religious commitment were accompanied by rampaging sexual promiscuity and a large measure of self-deprecation. He never became the great poet or fiction writer he had dreamed of being in his youth, but his life nonetheless belonged primarily to literature. It was as a translator that he made his lasting contributions, and above all, of course, as the first, and best, English translator of Proust.

John Wiltshire, the distinguished Austen scholar based at La Trobe University, has produced his fourth book on Jane Austen since 1992. Here, in a return to the critical bedrock of close reading, he invites us to share his pursuit of the ‘hidden’ Jane Austen – the supremely nuanced prose stylist.

Wiltshire argues that historical context is ultimately less important than ‘the implicit suggestions about human motive and behaviours that are conveyed in the pauses and implications of her prose’. His approach is informed by twentieth-century understandings of psychology and cognition, but he wears this theory lightly. His aim is simply to unpack Austen’s perceptions of the whole business of how we negotiate, through language, our lives in the community.

Much contemporary moral philosophy is highly abstract, with technical arguments advanced on issues that appear far removed from ordinary life. But not all academic ethics has this form. The field of practical ethics has flourished over the last four decades, bringing philosophical techniques to bear on ethical issues in medicine, animal husbandry, climate change, and global poverty. Peter Singer is the movement’s central figure, with his Practical Ethics, first published in 1979, now in its third edition.

While by no means a theoretical work, the contours of Singer’s commitment to utilitarianism can be discerned in his new book, The Most Good You Can Do. Originating in the work of Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Herbert Spencer, utilitarianism says that the morally best action in every situation is the one that maximises happiness. Utilitarianism is one formulation of consequentialism, the theory that actions are to be judged by their consequence rather than by, say, their adherence to God’s word or, as Kant thought, by their relation to duty.

The cover of Ray Whitrod’s re-released autobiography, Before I Sleep: My Life Fighting Crime and Corruption, strongly hints at a hard-hitting true crime memoir, dominated by the author’s troubled period as Queensland police commissioner from 1970 to 1976, when, as the blurb suggests, the state was ‘a haven for crooks from both sides of the law’. This impression is reinforced by a foreword from author–journalist Matthew Condon, whose books Three Crooked Kings (2013) and Jacks and Jokers (2014) revived interest in the extent of corruption in pre-Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland.

Before I Sleep is not quite what it appears. Whitrod’s Queensland years take up just fifty-three of its 227 pages, and his recollections, in keeping with the tone of the book generally, are sober and non-sensationalist. Whitrod was a moderately conservative, deeply religious man, motivated by public service. He consistently downplays the dramatic aspects of his story, avoids personal attacks, and, with a few exceptions, seems reluctant to engage in harsh criticism. This is not a problem, as such. It is Whitrod’s autobiography, and he has the right to define himself as he sees fit. But many readers of Before I Sleep might be expecting a rather different book. For this is a family history as much as it is about Whitrod’s law enforcement career. The prose is competent but not superlative. What elevates it is the author’s incredible recall of detail, which brings to life many scenes that would otherwise be prosaic.

Despite their disparate subject matter, the central concerns of Geoff Dyer’s books remain the same. Whether he is writing about photography, D.H. Lawrence, taking you scene-by-scene through Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, or, as in Another Great Day At Sea, spending two weeks aboard a US aircraft carrier, his abiding concerns – the self, the nature of writing, why one would go to the trouble of writing a book in the first place – inevitably rise to the fore. While you are guaranteed to learn a good deal about the subject along the way, it is these reflections that are the greatest pleasures of his books; that, and the fact he is one of the funniest writers working today.

Graeme Leith’s intention in writing this memoir was to pass on his knowledge and experience as chief winemaker of Passing Clouds winery in Victoria. Along the way, he discovered there was a lot more to say about his seventy-three years of life as an adventurer, larrikin, and family man. The result is almost an autobiography, complete with photographs, tracing his hard-working life from the Melbourne suburb of Preston to the ‘exhilarating rollercoaster ride’ of the vineyard in the Macedon Ranges.

Discussing the genesis of a poem, W.H. Auden told Paris Review that at any given time he had two things on his mind: ‘a theme that interests me and a problem of verbal form, meter, diction, etc. The theme looks for the right form; the form looks for the right theme. When the two come together, I am able to start writing.’ Australian poet Jordie Albiston’s The Weekly Poem, comprising fifty-two one-poem-per-week exercises, is a guide designed around such a synthesis. Able to be used by individual poets or set by teachers for creative writing students, each exercise marries a theme with the task of adhering to Albiston’s instructions and the formal concerns for that week.

Our sixth 'Poem of the Week' is 'As Wasps Fly Upwards' by Judith Beveridge. ABR's Poetry Editor, Lisa Gorton, introduces Judith who then discusses and reads her poem. 'As Wasps Fly Upwards' won the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize and was published in the May issue of Australian Book Review.

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As Wasps Fly Upwards

I’m walking home in the dying light of a summer’s day.
I do not know that within the minute
a tiny beetle will veer into my left eye,
its blade-like parts meant for slicing plant tissue,
slicing my cornea.
I do not know that within an hour
my eye will feel as though it has undergone a corneal graft
with razor blades, burning match heads
and acid rinses – Christmas eye, a doctor will call it.

I’m remembering this
because I’m reading about entomologist Justin Schmidt,
who once clung to a tree
suspended over a Costa Rican gorge
while enraged wasps squirted venom into his eyes;
a man stung by more winged insects than anyone,
who has classified all the piercing, irreverent,
bold, electric, smoky aches down to precise
decimal gradations
on a five-point Sting Pain Index.
I’ve also been reading a study that describes how Catholics
feel the ferocity of pain ease
if they contemplate images of Mary;
atheists if they watch documentaries
featuring David Attenborough – so I wonder,
when Schmidt steps on a nest of red harvester ants
and pain shoots like mordant dye through his body,
what angelic or analgesic image does he conjure
to demobilise the piercing, crunching agony;
or can he just sigh
and look into the distance and let his mind find relief
in the palliative cotton of wind-blown clouds?

I recall, once or twice in childhood, the pencil-point pressure
of a fang shooting an aggregation
of misery along my arm
as a spider discharged its voltage before dropping from my wrist
like decommissioned fuse wire.
And then there are the pangs that spasmodically flare
along the nerves on the underside of my upper right arm –
and I wonder if this is like the pain
Schmidt feels in his fingers
when digging up a colony of fire ants.

I remember, too, when an abundance of work and worry
has made my cranium feel as if it belonged
to a large-headed baby undergoing hours of obstructed labour.
Though perhaps if I’d been bitten by a bullet ant —
which Schmidt likens to fire-walking over flaming charcoal
with a three-inch rusty nail
grinding into your heel –   I might have a better point
of comparison and without hesitation
be grateful I’ve never had to invent a pain scale,
drawing and quartering metaphors for the way toxins
can burst open cellular membranes, or for the way
suffering can be internally transacted,
made dangerous and monstrous
by the fallacies of the self.

Sometimes I lie awake at night and remember
that death will come – perhaps, suddenly, from a tree
or an overhanging rock, or from a sliding shadow
in the grass; or from a knot of dark blood
bivouacking in my brain.
Or perhaps from a fever, my skin crawling
as though I were lying in the path of a horde of bull acacia ants;
or intense itching and burning as if I’d been
rubbed with a concoction of wasabi, hot mustard
and the necrotising venom of a white-tailed spider.
Or perhaps, just from a build-up over the years
of light, ephemeral stings –
barely noticed, no pain worth recording –
just a remote hum in a honey-vault of light
                                    then a smoky drifting away.

 

Judith Beveridge won the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Her latest poetry publications are Devadatta’s Poems and Hook and Eye, which has just been published by George Braziller for the US market. She currently teaches creative writing at the University of Sydney and is the poetry editor for Meanjin.