In April 2011 the Australian edition of Rolling Stone featured a cover photo of Yolngu multi-instrumentalist and singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu. The headline ‘Australia’s most important voice’ crawls along the sleeve of Gurrumul’s pinstriped suit, while the band names The National and Primal Scream hover above his shoulder. In the midst of so much noise, the portrait by Sydney photographer Adrian Cook embodies a still silence. Across Gurrumul’s torso lies the body of his guitar, held by lithe-fingered hands. Both gesture and posture suggest reserve and quiet: a stark juxtaposition with the idea of a ‘national primal scream’ that adjacent cover lines scramble to invent.

The shoot was quiet and intimate. Cook uses an old Hasselblad camera on a tripod, which means that he is face-to-face with his subjects. His own face is not, as it generally would be in contemporary photography, obscured. Cook stood a foot or so away from Gurrumul throughout the shoot and touched his face gently to pose each shot, tilting his face or lowering his chin. The sense of unrushed harmony is evident in these intimate photos.

Most Australians, if asked to name a date they associate with the name Gough Whitlam, would say ‘11 November 1975’. Steven Carroll subverts this expectation at the outset with Forever Young, which uses the last days of Whitlam as its historical backdrop as well as for other less tangible things. And the last days of Whitlam came not in 1975 but on 10 December 1977, when he was still leading the Labor Party in Opposition but stepped down after Labor lost its second federal election in two years. ‘He’s got that goodbye look in his eyes.’

This is the fifth novel in the ‘Glenroy’ series that began with The Art of the Engine Driver (2001). The series has followed the progress of a small family – Vic, Rita, and their son, Michael – since 1957, when Michael was a child growing up in an outer suburb of Melbourne that was still in the process of being transformed from dusty paddocks to a place with milk bars and factories. The most recent novel in the series, Spirit of Progress (2011), harks back to 1946 and brings in some new characters, who reappear in one plot strand of Forever Young, where they feature in one of the Dickensian coincidences that Carroll uses unapologetically to illustrate the way that time loops itself around in the mind to produce moments of significance and illumination.

Thomas Keneally’s novel The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972) is based in part on historical events, particularly the crimes committed by Jimmy Governor, an Aboriginal man from New South Wales. In 1900, Governor was a key figure involved in the killing of nine Europeans, including five women and children. The killings followed Governor’s marriage to a young white woman and taunts from the Mawbey household where they both worked. After fourteen weeks on the run with his brother Joe, Governor was arrested and sentenced to death for the murders. He was hanged at Darlinghurst Gaol on 14 January 1901, days after the declaration and ‘birth’ of the Australian nation. It is widely accepted that Governor’s execution was delayed so as not to spoil the birthday party.

I can’t speak my grandmother’s tongue and I’ve never been on
my grandfather’s land.  I’ve traveled here and I’ve traveled there,
my culture is fabricated in government-funded laboratories
… I am Frankenstein of the Dreamtime, I am Frankenstein
of the Dreamtime.  Reanimated flesh that once sang natural
song-lines, surgically removed my Christian soul and repaired
it with Indigenous design … I am a patriot to a black, yellow
and red flag, yet I am colour-blind … I am Frankenstein of the
Dreamtime.  I am a mutation of the white Australia policy,
I am Frankenstein of the Dreamtime … I am in the Prime
Minister’s nightmares, I am a self-educated Aborigine, I am
the Prime Minister’s worst nightmare. I am Frankenstein of
the Dreamtime … I scare some white people with my English,
and some black people too, I am a Frankenstein of the Dream-
time. Today people will sing ‘Advance Australia Fair’ and like
the abomination that I am, I can only ask Advance Australia
Where?  Thinking black is a thought-crime. I have no need for
Queen or desecrated country, only Australian nationalism can
define, I’m a renegade of Indigenous context, I am Frankenstein
of the Dreamtime … I was born into a family of song-people …
ink courses my veins, I am Frankenstein of the Dreamtime … I
am a songman not by a lifestyle choice … I am one of Tony Ab-
bott’s monsters, hiding under his bed … I think like his version
of a monster, therefore I am, Frankenstein of the Dreamtime.

April 2015 was the centenary of Gallipoli, an event deeply set in Australian history, but it was also the centenary of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians at the hands of the then Ottoman Empire. Yet the latter event is mired in controversy, and closure has not yet occurred. It was the first genocide of the twentieth century, but not the last.

How can it be that such an awful event is still the subject of dispute? Geoffrey Robertson QC analyses this subject in a readable but legal manner which will be of interest to lawyers and non-lawyers alike. There are two main issues. First, did it occur and what was its scope? Second, what should be the legal consequences following the establishment of the facts? A disturbing feature of this enquiry is the way in which certain Western governments including the United Kingdom have tailored their views for the sake of political advantage.

The facts cannot be seriously doubted. Whether it was 600,000 or 1.2 million Armenians that perished, it was obviously a crime against humanity. As most fact resolvers know, it is safer to rely on what was said at the time than on statements made long after the event. Winston Churchill, never one to mince his words, said in 1929:

In 1915 the Turkish government began and ruthlessly carried out the infamous general massacre and deportation of Armenians in Asia Minor … whole districts were blotted out in one administrative holocaust … there is no reasonable doubt that this crime was planned and executed for political reasons.

I was working as a technology journalist in San Francisco when Steve Jobs made his messianic return to Apple. It was September 1997, the height of the dotcom boom. In the city, the old industrial tracts between Market Street and China Basin were being transformed by start-ups. People were living on free pizza and hoping to strike it rich with stock options in an initial public offering. Cupertino, the spiritual home of Apple, was almost an hour away from the action of the SoMa (south of Market) area, renamed ‘Multimedia Gulch’ by some marketing shonk trying to ape the brand recognition of Silicon Valley.

Jobs’s return to Apple was big news. After all, the man was a living legend in the world of personal computing. Still, few techies thought much would change once the smoke cleared. Sure, Apple was a much-loved part of tech history – for example, the basement of one colleague’s Bay Area house was an unofficial museum containing working versions of every Apple product ever sold. Jobs had turned a small investment in an animation studio called Pixar into a $5 billion dollar windfall. But as Apple hadn’t been on the cutting edge since the release of the Apple II in 1977, it was bound to follow Atari into Silicon Valley’s bone-yard.

People were right to be sceptical. But we were wrong. Jobs – the man who had been thrown out of Apple in 1985 – didn’t just save Apple: he turned a company that was a whisper away from folding into the most valuable company on the planet. Four years after the death of Jobs, Apple has gone from strength to strength; even beating the odds and succeeding where other US tech companies have failed: China.

Who cares any more about Lenin? Time was, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) was revered, at least in some quarters, as the founding father of the Soviet Union, head of the first revolutionary state, pioneer in building socialism to end capitalist exploitation and create a better world. In the Soviet Union, Stalin overshadowed him for a few decades, while claiming loyal discipleship. But then, in the thaw following Stalin’s death in 1953, Lenin was reinvoked as a corrective to Stalin’s excesses, the man who had offered the true socialist model.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 meant that the revolution, and Lenin and Stalin along with it, temporarily disappeared from history. Post-Soviet Russians tended to talk as if the seventy-four years of Soviet power were a black hole in Russian history, trying to reattach their present to the imperial past and embrace new heroes like the last tsar, Nicholas II, and his reforming minister Pyotr Stolypin. Soon, however, Stalin made a comeback. As leader of the Russian victory in World War II and of the Soviet superpower in the Cold War that followed it, he was urgently needed to create a usable past. Lenin wasn’t needed in the same way. He had led a revolution that created an outcast nation. What was there to celebrate in that? So Stalin flourished in the Russian popularity polls on Great Men in History, with Lenin back in the shadows. The rest of the world showed a similar lack of interest. Socialism, or the Soviet version of it, had been shown to be worthless, unviable. History had ended, as Fukuyama argued, with the irrefutable triumph of capitalism and liberal democracy.

What drew you to writing?

Like most, reading. I spent a lot of time outdoors as a child, playing sport and wandering through bushland. Mum started working in libraries, and during school holidays my brother and I had to sit down quietly in a corner at her work. I read fantasy, classics like The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings. In my teen years I also consumed a lot of music and wanted to tell stories like my favourite songwriters.

Did you study creative writing? If not, why not? If so, was it worth it?

Yes, at Queensland University of Technology, straight out of high school. It was helpful, as I got to read a lot of works I would have never picked up, and could better articulate my ideas. My real education was meeting other Murri writers and editors when I started working for a project called black&write! at the State

We meet Kit, a reticent and slightly spoilt teenager, just after her arrival at the train station of an unnamed Victorian seaside town. She has been picked up by her friendly, daggy aunt Treen and taken to the Sea House, a dilapidated nineteenth-century mansion that is a case study in antipodean gothic.

Treen lives in the Sea House as a carer and companion to Kit’s grandparents, Audrey and Patrick. In a cluttered, shabby kitchen, the family shares an awkward meal of beef with beans and roast potatoes. Kit’s mother, Anna, has neglected to tell Treen that Kit is a vegetarian, and the girl unhappily picks at her beans, which ‘had been frozen and tasted faintly of dishwashing liquid’. Treen shows Kit to her bedroom: ‘It was a room where no one could ever have been comfortable.’ Such precise and tense evocations of family life are frequent in The Life of Houses, poet Lisa Gorton’s extremely poised first adult novel.

This room was Kit’s mother’s bedroom when she was a child, and as Treen watches Kit moving between the ‘humourlessly florid’ mahogany furniture, she remarks, ‘You might be her, standing there’. Kit is not comfortable taking her mother’s place in the Sea House; she bridles when her relatives and their friends comment upon their physical similarity.

Joel Simon has had more friends murdered than I have friends.Such is the burden of the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organisation that promotes press freedom worldwide. As recent events painfully illustrate, journalism can be a dangerous vocation. ‘Murder, after all,’ Simon writes, ‘is the ultimate form of censorship.’

The New Censorship catalogues the harassment, imprisonment, and violence borne by journalists around the world in a seemingly endless battle for control of ideas. Simon takes us from Pakistan, to the Philippines, to Putin’s Russia. He is a journalist by trade, and in large part this book reads accordingly: like a horrific collage of editorial coverage of the murder of colleagues. The method is appropriate. The anecdotes form a persuasive platform from which to sell the cause of press freedom.

The book was written between 2011 and 2013. I am not sure whether this is perfect or tragic timing. In the year or so since, many of the core issues that it addresses have magnified in importance and gained a new prominence in the public consciousness. Take the critique of what Simon terms the ‘democratators’: a generation of popularly elected autocrats. Putin is taken to task for meagre government responses to the murder of journalists. The justice that did come is characterised as ‘nothing more than a crude political calculation’. Recently, we have seen more crude calculation in the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine. When MH17 was shot down, the international community struggled to get access to the crash site. While Russian-backed media obfuscated, Putin denied his country’s responsibility, and nearly copped a shirt-fronting. Although Simon focuses on the position of journalists, the substance of his critique can be directed to the broader conduct of faux-democracies. Although Simon’s call to ‘expose the democratators’ is nothing new, it is timely.

Why do you write?

Not to do so would be almost unbearable. Some stories need to be told more widely, and may need to be cloaked in wonder to enable others to tune their ear to them.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

When I wake, I rarely remember anything of my dream-state. Once awake, though, I’m a frantic and sometimes devastatingly ambitious dream-conjurer.

Where are you happiest?

In the late writing hours, with shuffling sounds from my sleeping children drifting in.

Writing an effective book on climate change is a challenge as diabolicalas it is important. The complexity of the science, economics, and politics is daunting. How to extract the diamonds lurking in the rough of the International Panel on Climate Change reports? How to balance the good cop, dishing out hope, with the bad, lashing the reader with honest accounts of potential catastrophe? If the book should be a hit, how to fend off those hordes of vested interests determined to muddy even the clearest of waters?

Climate Shock’s strategy is not obvious on first picking up the book. Published by Princeton University Press, and authored in part by the highly respected Harvard economist Martin L. Weitzman, one might expect the rattling of a bone-dry academic paper. The subtitle, ‘The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet’, suggests loftier ambitions: it references the great economist John Maynard Keynes’s book The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which married scholarly insight with sparkling prose. On the other hand, the ferocious red of the cover, with jagged lines carving out the promise to ‘shock’, screams sensationalism. It is more in line with the style of the book’s co-author, Gernot Wagner, who has penned accessible books on climate change like But Will the Planet Notice? (2012). By the end of the preface, it is clear that Wagner’s jocularity has prevailed. It is his road we travel, through the landscape of Weitzman’s research.

The Western Isles arch across the north-west coast of Scotland, sheltering the mainland from the North Sea’s fury. In summer there are few places more magical than these islands, which Seton Gordon once described as standing ‘on the rim of the material earth’ looking west to the immortal realm of Tir nan Og.

On the northern islands, granite and gneiss mountains rise shattered and fractured from the patchwork of rolling bogs, lochs, and heath stippled with cinquefoil, tufted vetch, and gentians. To the south, white sands are blanketed by machair, scented with yellow bedstraw, milkworts, and harebells. Between them lies a scattering of smaller islands in the Sound of Harris, resisting the tug and pull of fierce tides that surge the narrow channel, breaking the ‘Long Island’ in half.

Everywhere, in this remote and sparsely populated landscape, the work of human hands is apparent. The smallest rocky island, seasonally submerged by winter swells (by bóc-thannoc, as Robert Macfarlane tells us), will be populated by crofters’ sheep. Furrowed feannagan orlazybeds crosshatch the island’s thin soil. Everywhere, in this apparent wilderness, are the ruins of shielings and blackhouses; thatched roofs eaten and low walls sheltering sheep. Herringboned peatstacks demarcate family turf in lonely bogs. Neolithic chambered tombs, prehistoric stone circles, and Viking treasure hoards document continuous human habitation for more than 10,000 years.

Although many attempt it, writing the biography of an actor of a previous era is fraught. They consist mainly of lists of movies or plays long forgotten. The reception of their art is recorded by critics, once all-powerful, but now unknown. Their personal life and personality are hidden behind a screen of studio publicity. Writing the lives and careers of two stars might seem to double the difficulty.

Brian McFarlane, however, has overcome these difficulties admirably and shown in Double-Act: The Remarkable Lives and Careers of Googie Withers and John McCallum that a dual biography, if the subjects are married, can be twice as good. The theatre and movie public seem to love a married couple. This was certainly the case with this duo, who are rightly called Australian theatre royalty in this entertaining and informative book.

Googie Withers and John McCallum were both children of the Empire, born in 1917 and 1918 in Karachi (in then British India) and Brisbane. (Googie’s unusual nickname seems to have been given her by her Indian ayah.) Their peripatetic childhoods prepared them for the transnational lives they lived as adults. Withers was seven when she left India, living first in Paris and then in England. John’s father was the proprietor of Brisbane’s Cremorne Theatre. His restless British-born mother moved the family to England when he was nine, and he attended school there and in Switzerland for three years.

Since the publication of his début novel, Summerland (2000), Malcolm Knox has established himself as one of the most ambitious and exciting fiction writers at work in Australia. A seasoned journalist, recipient of two Walkley Awards– one for his work, with Caroline Overington, in the exposé of Norma Khouri– and prolific author of diverse non-fiction works that include I Still Call Australia Home: The Qantas Story (2005), Scattered: The Inside Story of Ice in Australia (2008), and Bradman’s War (2012), Knox began his life as a novelist by paying homage to a twentieth-century master. While Summerland uses Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1915) as its springboard, Knox proves unflinching in the subjects that consume him there and which continue to do so: namely, Australian identity and masculinity.

Knox’s novels, which include his wondrous follow-up, A Private Man (2004), as well as Jamaica (2008) and The Life (2011), are unlike any in contemporary Australian fiction. Given the close attention that all of his fiction pays to Australia, the often-unidentifiable settings of The Wonder Lover, along with the ambition that it announces in its early pages, make this latest novel a startling addition to Knox’s body of work. The art of the novel is always a high-wire act; here we find the author at work without a net.

Rod Jones’s new novel, The Mothers, works on a number of levels. It provides a social and familial history of life in Melbourne’s working-class suburbs throughout the twentieth century while also telling the often moving stories of individuals connected across generations, usually mothers and children, battling to survive in adverse circumstances.

The novel gives us a rich panoply of characters, places, and issues. The overall effect is rather like that of looking through a box of faded photographs, turning each one in the light, hearing something of their story, bringing lost faces and eras to life. Narrated throughout in a focalising, third-person voice, The Mothers moves between this kind of historical distancing and the light touches of the novelist, working with imagery and nuance to give us insight into these disparate lives.

For this reviewer, it’s been a long five years since the publication of Stephen Daisley’s Traitor (2010). The rightly acclaimed and award-winning début novel wrote of the terrors of war, and the life on the land of one irreparably damaged New Zealand soldier, David. As an exploration of the damage done to an ordinary and unappreciated man, the prose was often hauntingly poetic, often carrying the weight of what can’t be said – the sadness and the tragedy that is too immense to take in. In this respect Traitor was a truly original vision, and yet many of its thematic concerns, its deft use of the telling detail, its beautiful descriptions of landscape and ear for dialogue are also present in Coming Rain.

The novel takes place in 1956, largely in the ‘marginal wheat and sheep lands’ of the South-West of Western Australia. Lew, a young man in his early twenties, and Painter, his older companion, work as a team charcoal burning and shearing, moving from job to job in Lew’s old truck. Lew is eager for experience, and the novel opens with his seduction by an older woman, using him as a stand-in for her husband killed in the war. Painter however is well-beyond taking any interest in matters-of-the-heart, having burnt his bridges during his drinking years. Daisley describes him thus: ‘wearing a blue Jackie Howe singlet. Unshaved face. A bald head worn brown in the sun, covered in scars and odd bumps. Both ears were lumped, cauliflowered, and his left ear was much smaller. The nose broken so many times there was no bridge left. He had big wrinkled hands covered in tattoos of birds and stars.’ Painter is a man who has learned, often from bitter experience, to ‘lie to tell the truth and distrust the truth as a lie’. Indeed, it’s an authentic feature of the masculine relationships in this book that a man like Painter is most impressive when he’s silent, immersed in his labours, working alongside his younger companion. When the pair arrive at the eastern-wheatbelt station of John Drysdale, to shear a thousand-odd head of sheep, this importance of work as the emotional core at the heart of their relationship becomes foregrounded, and allows Daisley free rein to employ some of his most vivid writing. Here the minutiae of farm life are rendered with respect and sympathy, emphasising the ingenuity by which farmers have adapted an alien technology to the demands of the new land. Lew and Painter work with a resourcefulness and unspoken pride that expresses the truth that it’s the respect for the job, and the self-respect associated with doing the job right, in which the true dignity of work is to be found.

In 1977 the aspiring poet Alan Gould travelled through Europe with his friend Kevin Hart. Just such a tour forms the narrative thread for Gould’s latest novel, The Poets’ Stairwell. This is a roman à clef and those in the know will enjoy the identification game.

More interesting, though, is the intellectual journey; Gould’s virginal twenty-seven-year-old hero, Claude Boon, slowly defining his own poetic self against the austere and particular mode of his strikingly talented younger friend, Henry Luck. A vagabond he might be for these few months, but Boon is no picaro. Adventurous and willing to abet the occasional rogue, he is decidedly not one himself. Though well into adulthood, Boon undergoes a steady process of maturing and self-understanding during his journey. The subtitle of The Poets’ Stairwell could as well be ‘A Bildungsroman’.

Mario Vargas Llosa is one of the marvels of contemporary fiction. The Peruvian Nobel Prize winner not only bestrides it like a colossus, he is also a law unto himself. It is as if he takes the legacy of a realism that is only in his hands magical (because of the enchantment he creates from it) as a kind of blank cheque with which he can license any expense of narrative in a waste of flaming invention. Except that it’s not waste; his plotting is a remarkable thing as he keeps the wheels of invention turning.

I remember being staggered by the poignancy as well as the steadiness of vision in The Bad Girl (Travesuras de la niña mala,2006), in which a kind of chronicle became a many-gabled mansion of desire and memory. What was it Lytton Strachey called Shakespeare’s last plays? ‘Dotages’: adding injury to the insult of Ben Jonson’s ‘mouldy old tales’. Well, there is an aspect to the work of the seventy-nine-year-old writer which is supremely relaxed, easy and doodling and constantly fiddling with his own surfaces and lines of narrative expectation in a way that suggests the bard in his Prospero phase: desert islands, conscious illusions and their implied metaphysics, the drowning of books. He writes as a great chef improvises, throwing pineapple and garlic together because you can make the paella from any damn thing if the basics are there and you can imagine the equation of a flavour from any incongruity of elements.

Outside academia, Patrick Modiano was virtually unknown in the English-speaking world before the announcement of his Nobel Prize in October 2014. Since then, no fewer than seven different US publishers have joined the race to bring out Modiano titles, which is gratifying for those familiar with the work of a man ranked as one of France’s great writers for over forty years. It is especially pleasing that Text Publishing has secured the rights for two of the author’s books, due to appear in 2015.

To the credit of Yale University Press, Suspended Sentences had been planned before the Nobel announcement, although the Nobel did lead to an acceleration of publication, and a hugely increased print-run. The translator, Mark Polizzotti, who is publisher and editor-in-chief at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had impressive experience when he came to Modiano, having already translated more than three dozen works from French, and several by one of France’s most quirky and stylistically complex contemporary writers, Jean Echenoz. Almost all of the preceding Modiano translations – with the exception of Joanna Kilmartin’s Dora Bruder – were lacklustre, lifeless. There remains a danger that some publishers, in attempting to ride the Nobel wave, will simply reissue the flops of yesteryear, rather than seek to meet the benchmark set by Polizzotti, who has found the vitality of voice, pitch, and tone that, in the French, make Modiano’s imaginary world so mesmerising. Polizzotti has also provided a thoroughly researched and readable introduction to the author and the ‘dreamed-up’ autobiographical impulses and strategies that inform his literary creation.

The first book in Barry Maitland’s projected Belltree Trilogy, Crucifixion Creek features veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, detective Harry Belltree. The eponymous Creek is a wasteland in south-western Sydney with a bloody history of settlement, including punitive expeditions against the local Aboriginal tribe; race-based riots that ended in the lynching of Chinese market gardeners; and the usual boom-and-bust fortunes of the ever-present Sydney developer. The Creek is now controlled by a criminal biker gang with fingers in every pie from illegal drugs to servicing corrupt politicians and policemen, developers, and paedophiles.

Water courses through the history of Western Australia. When historian Ruth A. Morgan began writing Running Out?: Water in Western Australia in 2007, the state was in the grip of drought, climate change was at the fore of public debate, and Perth’s first desalination plant was a year old. The 2005 state election had hinged on the ‘Kimberley–Perth canal’, an impractical scheme to water the gardens of Perth via a 3,700-kilometre canal from the Fitzroy River in the state’s‘empty’ north-west. Long-simmering fears of ‘running out’ were bubbling to the surface.

In this compelling scholarly history of water in Western Australia, Morgan probes the anxieties and aspirations that accompany life where the desert meets the sea. She charts the rise of the state’s current water regime and questions the lush green gardens that defiantly line the parched streets of Perth. Western Australia has not experienced ‘average’ rainfall since the 1970s. In that time, precipitation in the South West has declined by about fifteen per cent. It is an extraordinary shift, and an ominous sign of the dangers of anthropogenic climate change. Yet many residents remain sheltered from these environmental realities. Western Australians are the most profligate water-users in the country. ‘How,’ Morgan wonders, ‘did the people of Perth become so thirsty?’

Weather and climate are fascinating enigmas, their allure enhanced by their intangibility; shadows hovering in the background and yet profoundly shaping human history. Climate is always both present and absent, and its importance unnoticed.

Geoffrey Blainey observed more than forty years ago that climate was a neglected player in Australian history. Perhaps inspired by the urgency of global climate change, as well as by the burgeoning field of environmental history and, more recently, by drought in the 2000s, this disregard has begun to be addressed. Climate, Science, and Colonization makes an informative contribution to this exciting and energetic preoccupation for Australasian history. It joins a growing genre of explorations of the climate’s role in history such as Don Garden’s Droughts, Floods and Cyclones: El Niños that Shaped our Colonial Past (2009), Deb Anderson’s Endurance: Australian Stories of Drought (2014), and Ruth A. Morgan’s Running Out? Water in Western Australia (2015). Many of the authors of earlier monographs contribute to this new book. As an edited interdisciplinary collection exploring both cultural and scientific responses to climate across time, Climate, Science, and Colonization follows in the tradition of a pioneer in Australian climate history: A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia (2005), by Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths, and Libby Robin. Unlike their predecessors, the editors tilt this new collection towards an academic audience.

Charles Bean is now seen as one of the classiest journalists and historians Australia has produced. Like many talented historians, he had no prior training in his craft, except as a war correspondent during World War I, when he wrote in the face of daily and nightly dangers such as most war journalists no longer have to confront.

I have the strong impression that when I first tried to be a historian, Bean’s national ranking – outside military circles – was not so high. In the history schools of the nation, the two world wars were not yet in favour. Maybe they were too recent. It would be interesting to learn whether Bean in his lifetime was prescribed reading for any history courses in Australia. As a rule, the wartime politicians were studied, academically, more than the generals, and Billy Hughes more than John Monash.

Clear-eyed, unsentimental, but compassionate, with a nicely honed flair for story-telling, Graeme Davison is one of Australia’s master historians. Now Emeritus Professor of History at Monash University, his early training was in R.M. Crawford’s so-called Melbourne History School, where it was simply assumed that books would be written. Crawford’s department at the University of Melbourne produced a remarkable roll call of writers, including Geoffrey Blainey, Manning Clark, Ken Inglis, Margaret Kiddle, John Mulvaney, Geoffrey Serle, and F.B. (Barry) Smith (who died in Canberra on 3 March). In the years after Crawford, the Melbourne tradition of scholarship and fine historical writing has continued apace and always with distinction. Davison’s interests have been primarily in the history of cities in Australia, the United Kingdom, and Europe. His The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978) is regarded as a classic, while his award-winning Car Wars (2004), viewed Australia’s urban history through the windscreen, telling us how the car ‘won our hearts and conquered our cities’. Davison has also given distinguished service to his profession, not least as editor (with John Hirst and Stuart Macintyre) of the indispensable The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998).

In the relative leisure of his post-academic career (retirement is a powerfully inappropriate term), Davison has turned his attention to the intimate world of his personal family story – its background in England and its descent in Australia from 1850, when his widowed great-great-great grandmother Jane Hewett and her eight older children landed in Melbourne. As a young man and later as an academic historian, Davison avoided family history, perhaps unconsciously minimising or denying the influence of inheritance and kin on his own life but coming to resent the genealogists that noisily crowd the reading rooms of our public libraries and archives, a daily hazard of the implied higher calling of the professional historian. But if the genealogical craze is too easily disdained, it is also easy to miss the opportunities it offers to see the ways in which ‘everyman’ stories of the daily grind and ordinary life are shaped by the currents and patterns of the larger and seemingly impersonal forces we call history. Davison makes no such mistake. At a time in his life when the temptations to reminiscence and nostalgia have grown stronger, he confesses: ‘I succumbed to the appeal of family history, not only because I wanted to better understand who I am, but also in order to think more concretely about the relationship between the familial and the communal pasts.’

Our second 'Poem of the Week' is 'The Subject of Feeling by ABR Editor Peter Rose. 'The Subject of Feeling' is the title poem in Rose's latest collection, out now from UWA Publishing, and it was published in the June-July issue of Australian Book Review.

The Subject of Feeling

Outside the church, unmemoried,
names of the dearest          
deserting me, I turn as they
load you in the hearse, set off
with a small police escort.

For a quarter of a century
we have been ramming you
in cars of various sorts,
long before the age
of ramps and hoists.

They took longer to prise you
from the giddified wreck –
two hours was the report.
Eschatology is a slow
remorseless science.

While they forged above
a woman squeezed inside
and stayed with you,
marvelled at your composure,
heard about a new daughter.

Then the subject of feeling –
why you had none in your feet.
Men ground the car with steel
and flung it open
like a sack of wheat.

Peter Rose is the Editor of Australian Book Review. His books include a family memoir, Rose Boys (2001), which won the National Biography Award in 2003. He has published two novels and six poetry collections, most recently The Subject of Feeling (UWA Publishing, 2015).

Porter Prize

On 12 May a large audience gathered at the excellent Collected Works bookshop in Melbourne for the announcement of the 2015 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, always a highlight on the ABR calendar (see photographs of the event here). First we heard from several admirers of Peter Porter’s work who read individual poems by him. After the poets or their representatives had introduced and read their poems, Morag Fraser, who supports this Prize, announced that Judith Beveridge’s poem ‘As Wasps Fly Upwards’ was the overall winner. She received $5,000. The other five shortlisted poets – Eileen Chong, Toby Fitch, John Kinsella, Kate Middleton, and Alex Skovron (whose new collection, Towards the Equator, is reviewed here) – each received $500. All six poems appeared in our May issue and can be read by subscribers here.

Judith Beveridge told Advances: ‘I am deeply honoured to have won the Porter Prize, not only because of the high regard I have for Peter Porter’s poetry and for Australian Book Review, but also because of the very strong 2015 shortlist. I loved all the poems and was truly surprised to hear I’d won. My sincere thanks to ABR for continuing this prestigious prize which is a great support for poets.’

The judges on this occasion were Lisa Gorton, Paul Kane, and Peter Rose.

ABR looks forward to presenting the twelfth Porter Prize later this year.

Openings

Our Editor welcomes opportunities to meet bright young things who are interested in writing for the magazine. One question arose during a recent class at the University of Sydney: how to open a review to maximum effect? Clearly, reviews published in literary magazines or newspapers have less time to ‘grab’ the reader’s attention. Reviews are read in bed and other unmentionable places. They are read fitfully, contingently, sometimes distractedly.

This issue contains several reviews whose opening sentences caught our Editor’s attention. Here is Sheila Fitzpatrick, the eminent Soviet historian, introducing a major new biography: ‘Who cares any more about Lenin?’. Michael Douglas, in his first review for us, begins startlingly, ‘Joel Simon has had more friends murdered than I have friends’. David McCooey, on Michael Farrell’s new poetry collection, begins: ‘As popular culture has long understood (hello Priscilla, hello Muriel), there is something queer about Australia’. Advances defies you not to read on.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Applications are now open for the next ABR Patrons' Fellowship. This Fellowship is for an extended article with an indigenous focus. The Fellowship, open to all published Australian writers, is worth $5000 and applications close September 1.

Where have you been?

The German-born poet, translator, and critic, Michael Hofmann, knows a thing or two about delivering shocks, to readers and authors alike, as Richard Flanagan found out recently. (Hofmann, in the LRB of 18 December 2014, published an excoriating review of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, to which A.C. Grayling – chair of the Booker Prize judging panel – took splenetic exception.)

Hofmann has just published a collection of thirty essays: Where Have You Been? (Faber, $59.99 hb, 296 pp, 9780571323661). Many of them first appeared in those other acronyms – LRB, NYRB, TLS – but one of them, a review of Australian Poetry Since 1788, was originally published in ABR (December 2011–January 2012). Those with a penchant for less seemly, courtly, equanimous reviews will enjoy Hofmann’s brilliant, if not inexpensive, compilation.

Apropos of first lines, Hofmann opens one review: ‘What can I tell you about Robert Lowell?’ Well, plenty.

Supporting Australian writers

Last month we editorialised about the worrying tendency to deny freelance reviewers (especially younger ones) payment for their journalism. Many ABR readers have responded supportively – some with a degree of incredulity regarding this culture of exploitation. We thank them for their interest, and we are immensely grateful to those people (some Patrons, some not) who have donated to the magazine in recent weeks. ABR is committed to further increasing its payments to writers (which have doubled in the past two years).

Special offer

Help us to spread the word about what ABR has to offer new readers by encouraging friends and colleagues to subscribe. If they subscribe (mentioning your name and subscriber number in the process), we will add two free issues to your current subscription – and two more for the next recruit you enlist. Enlist five and we will add a year to your subscription. N.B. this offer applies only to print subscribers within Australia. EThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. for more details. (Conditions apply.)

LEADING THE CHARGE

Dear Editor,

It was welcome indeed to read your editorial setting out Australian Book Review’s full-throated support for the proper payment of young writers (May 2015). In the current economic climate, forging a literary career is extremely difficult. Cuts to universities and books pages have diminished opportunities for young writers, like myself, to work full-time in literature. Egregiously, some major commercial news outlets exploit writers by publishing their work for free (or near as dammit), in exchange for the much-needed byline. Unpaid internships are another gloomy reality. All of this risks our professional literary life being reserved for the rich.

Part of a series aimed at undergraduates, Ron Wilson’s stimulating guide to American gangster cinema covers much ground in just over a hundred pages. What is especially useful about Wilson’s approach is his ability to place the genre in a context that extends beyond cinema: not so much what actual gangsters said and did, but the various discourses, from pulp novels to politicians’ speeches, that established the gangster as a figure of legend. The book also supplies a summary of English-language scholarship in the field, starting with Robert Warshow’s famous essay ‘The Gangster as Tragic Hero’ (1948); characteristically, Wilson treats this pioneering study with due respect while pointing out that the archetypal rise-and-fall narrative identified by Warshow is found in only a handful of films.

The reconstruction of the built environment that followed World War II was central to the development of international design in the third quarter of the twentieth century. This is the background and context for Mid-Century Modern Complete, a large volume which covers design and architecture (mostly European and North American) from the 1940s to the early 1970s. As Dominic Bradbury notes in the introduction in this recent addition to an ever-expanding literature: ‘For designers and architects, especially, it was an extraordinary time to be at work, and the opportunities for creativity and originality were widespread and welcome.’ The wide range of images, covering everything produced for the home and beyond, shows how original and how pervasive modern design was (and is).

Spurred by rampant consumerism in the United States, and complemented by numerous technological and manufacturing advances and more specialist teaching and trainers of designers, it is little wonder that there was such an amazing efflorescence of design, and not surprising that so much stuff was made. (It will be an intrepid historian who follows the path of Asa Briggs’s Victorian Things and makes a similar study of Elizabethan things from the second half of the twentieth century.) The attractive design of much postwar furniture and objects appeals to a modern sensibility and has ensured their survival. Furthermore, so much was produced (and frequently reproduced), with many designs staying in production for decades ‘(e.g. Charles and Ray Eames’s chairs and David Mellor cutlery), that an astonishing range of second-hand furniture, glassware, ceramics, and cutlery from the 1950s to the 1970s is still available. The best and rarest examples are avidly sought by collectors and museums, and fetch huge prices. Others can often be found cheaply, in immaculate condition, sometimes unused and retaining original makers’ or retailers’ labels and packaging. Is this due to the fact that the first owners did not like using fragile or awkward glassware and cutlery in the first place, or did they just have too many things to choose from in their houses and left their modernist wedding presents stored at the back of cupboards, a legacy for their children to dispose of?

‘The mind retires from such speculation, unsatisfied but impressed’

Michael Wilding’s biographical study traces in minute detail the interwoven lives of Adam Lindsay Gordon, Marcus Clarke, and Henry Kendall as their destinies converged on Melbourne and the Yorick Club from 1868. The Yorick started its life as a club for literary men, although this term came to be interpreted loosely. The book charts the trajectories that led to the conjunction of the three men, and does not neglect the individuals they encounter along the way. As a study of important colonial writers and their community, at a particularly productive period in their separate and interconnecting lives, it is a valuable record.

Marcus Clarke and Adam Lindsay Gordon were of upper-middle-class British stock; both had emigrated. The book follows Gordon’s intermittently kindled hopes of inheriting the family estate in Scotland through entail. Marcus Clarke had already inherited some capital, but spent much of his patrimony on failed land deals, newspaper proprietorships, and other disappointing investments. Henry Kendall was of humbler but respectable Australian-born stock. One of the many things the three literary men had in common, along with their writing talents and love of literature, was a great and growing want of money. On the periphery of the narrative are their long-suffering wives. Clarke and Gordon married beneath them, in class terms, but also managed to marry forbearing women. If you are going to be short of money and flighty, it is probably best to choose a woman used to work and with lower expectations. Clarke’s actress wife, Marian Dunn, appears to have been very tolerant for some time (although she was having second thoughts by 1871). Gordon’s Maggie was an expert horsewoman, and shared at least one of his key interests. Kendall’s wife, although not socially ‘beneath’ him, at least initially had a high threshold for waiting around for the housekeeping money to be borrowed, although ultimately her limit was reached. Women are incidental to this narrative, however. The community that Wilding carefully traces is a male community, which operated through and around the primarily male spaces of Melbourne’s clubs, cafés, theatres, bars, hotels, racetracks, and newspaper offices.

In the Melbourne suburb where I spent my childhood, a café was a place where ethnic men played cards and backgammon, puffed on cigarettes, and looked up from time to time to watch through the window the passing parade on the footpath outside. Now, when I return to Northcote, I am often served in hip cafés by boyish men with Ned Kelly beards and stylishly informal young women who call me ‘mate’. They speak in Australian accents that were rarely to be heard in the shops of my 1970s childhood.

We did not regard ours as an inner suburb; or at least not as ‘inner’ in the manner of Fitzroy, Carlton, Collingwood, and Richmond. Nor were there too many obvious signs of what I would later learn is ‘gentrification’ or, as it is also less euphoniously called in this admirable book, ‘trendification’. Its effects are now evident in almost every corner, from the beautifully restored exteriors of so many of its old houses and the foreign cars parked in the driveways, to the cafés, wine bars, and restaurants that line High Street. It is clearest of all in rising property prices.

In her long-form essay Dear Life, columnist and fiction writer Karen Hitchcock considers how we in Australia treat the elderly and dying. To the task she brings her formidable skills as a writer and her experience at the coalface, working as a staff physician in a Melbourne public hospital. The result is a sensitive, rigorous, and moving account that exposes the prevailing ageism in our medical services and in Australian society as a whole.

Countering the popular opinion that the elderly are becoming an increasing burden on our economy and resources, Hitchcock argues for an ethical and compassionate approach to aged care, where older people are no longer infantalised and patronised. Currently, the elderly are often sidelined in a world of increasing specialisation, where general physicians are becoming rare, health services fragmented, and systemic care of the patient overlooked.

After a substantial career as a minister in the Beattie government, Anna Bligh served as Queensland Labor premier from 2007 to 2012. She was the first female premier in Australia to lead her party to victory at a state election. These experiences have given her many interesting tales to tell about winning elections, retaining community and party support, as well as pushing through reforms. Bligh’s new memoir, Through the Wall, is partly framed as an inspirational text for future leaders, especially the women who will come after her:

I’ve always been bloody-minded about walls. Rather than being discouraged by them, I’ve felt an urge to break them down or jump right over them. Far from being discouraged by the doubters and the naysayers, I have been spurred on by a fierce desire to prove the bastards wrong.

While her leadership philosophy is clearly explained, Bligh’s writing is most compelling when she tells unpretentious and heartfelt stories about her early life and later career. The book has some affecting moments in which the reader is engaged fully with Bligh’s experiences of being a woman in public life and the attitudes and events which have shaped her career. She describes her difficult relationship with her father with remarkable sensitivity and restraint, and the importance of family to Bligh as an anchor and support is shown in some moving passages about her mother, husband, children, and siblings.

Patti Miller has written four books of or about memoir, one of which, The Mind of a Thief (UQP, 2012) won the New South Wales Premier’s History Award, and she has taught life writing for more than twenty years. Yet her most recent publication, Ransacking Paris, while enjoyable at one level, is disappointing at another. There is a serious mismatch between form and content, the jarring discrepancy between them not helped by the characteristic peculiar to all memoir of the writer being present on virtually every page. This memoir wears not only its heart, but its author on its sleeve; there is a whiff of Josh Thomas’s recent television series Please Like Me in its tone.

When the writer is honest, modest, and disarming, what’s not to like? Miller is clearly a likeable person, generously sharing with us her memories of a year’s stay in Paris happily accompanied by her sympathetic husband. The voice is consistent, her personal style well-honed. Then what is the issue? Well, the content, and, yes, its presentation. This memoir is not just about the fulfilment of a long-standing dream to live in the fabled city, or how, arriving in Paris with very little French, she got to know both the language and the locals through one-on-one conversation classes, even joining a choir and performing in a street concert. It is also about classical French memoirists, medieval and modern, Montaigne, Beauvoir et al.

As popular culture has long understood (hello Priscilla, hello Muriel), there is something queer about Australia. Michael Farrell’s latest collection of poems, Cocky’s Joy, rewrites Australia as a site of almost-inherent queerness. ‘Cocky’ is antipodean slang for a farmer, but the term’s evocation here is surely a camp subversion of traditional, masculinist forms of Australian nationalism. Farrell brilliantly deforms Australian (literary) history into surreal comedy. The surreal comedy in ‘Bush Christie’ – an Agatha Christie-style mystery featuring the early canonical Australian poets, along with Bennelong and the Kelly Gang – is both deadpan and allusive: ‘Uncharacteristically quiet was Charles / Harper thought Bennelong, who had / Himself been speared but never homicidal- / Ly. Ned and Dan Kelly played snooker.’

Deadpan intertextuality is characteristic of Cocky’s Joy. Comic narratives and surreal imagery seem to pour out of Farrell, as we see in ‘The Structuralist Cowboy’, which queers the figure of the cowboy in a way that makes Brokeback Mountain seem dull: ‘Whether they rode in from the / crossroads of Trivia or from a dry spot in New / South Fuckmyarse, was ever discussed. Aaiiee! might / just be the Apocalypse squealing. I wrestled with / my father: the thought that he was John Ashbery / gave me the extra strength to lay him on his back.’ Farrell, as this may suggest, is not an easy poet to quote, given the associative jumps and non sequiturs of his energetic and endlessly inventive ‘riffing’ style. ‘Motherlogue’, one of the collection’s standout poems, is almost impossible to summarise, though Farrell describes it in the book’s press release as narrating a ‘story-within-a-story about a harried mother encountering the Devil, and commencing a multilingual battle with him, while searching for water on Sydney’s North Shore’. In addition, the poem is ‘a parodic homage to colonial greats Barbara Baynton and Henry Lawson’. Farrell’s description omits the poem’s apparent homage to 1970s Euro-horror films. There is, needless to say, nothing like this in Australian poetry (except perhaps ‘Beautiful Mother’, also in Cocky’s Joy, which won the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2013, when I was one of the judges).

Alex Skovron’s impressive volume of new and selected poems, Towards the Equator, drawn from all of his published work to date, shows him to be a writer of recurrent and abiding preoccupations. He cares passionately and sometimes rather fastidiously about culture (particularly European culture), and continually worries about words, books, and their import. He is formally accomplished, writing sonnets and other complex verse forms as well as delivering a collection of poised ten-line ‘sonnetinas’ and a group of meditative prose poems. He repeatedly questions the import of historical events and currents – in one poem history is ‘our cross and our salvation’ – and frequently quizzes the significance of time.

The prose poem ‘Encounters’ suggests the possibility of ‘a middle path’ between regret and hope – ‘between understanding nothing and too much’. Skovron often adopts this position in his work. His poems are full of hope – for the future of human culture – and certain kinds of regret – a general regret for human violence and intransigence. Mind you, in his ‘middle path’ Skovron knows and understands a great deal. It is just that his poems repeatedly demonstrate a reluctance to overstate his claims on knowledge and understanding.

Jessica L. Wilkinson won the 2014 Peter Porter Poetry Prize with ‘Arrival Platform Humlet', a phantasmagoria of typographical and lexical invention whirling around a tune of the same name by Percy Grainger. This book performs the same service for his whole life and oeuvre, to stunning effect.

Grainger (1882–1961) is generally known as an interesting character first and a composer second. Wilkinson helpfully lists for us the various Percys on offer, among them the Folk-Song Collector, the Nordic, the Flagellant. This was a man who founded a museum in his own memory and who preserved a large part of the English folk tradition while also advocating ‘free’ machine-generated music.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of arguably the biggest single breakthrough in our knowledge of how immunity works. After years of uncertainty, it turned out that the immune system contains two major functional classes of white blood cells. One class recognises foreign organisms, such as invading bacteria or transplanted tissue from an incompatible organ donor, ultimately leading to their rejection and destruction by the body. The other class recognises foreign chemicals in the body, and responds by neutralising them with highly specific antibodies. These foreign chemicals include proteins on the outer surfaces of infectious viruses and bacteria. Once targeted by antibodies, invading micro-organisms can be overcome by the immune system. The diversity of potentially pathogenic organisms is immense. Consequently, the immune system must be incredibly complex and adaptable to withstand these ever-present challenges to our well-being. Nevertheless, many of the mechanisms determining its operation are now well understood, not least due to the internationally recognised research undertaken at Melbourne’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute.

Remarkably, one of the greatest advances in public health and preventative medicine occurred well before the biological basis of immunity was known. The development of immunisation as a protective measure against deadly or disabling disease was a triumph of skilled scientific experimentation and observation, built upon generations of folk experience. As a result of immunisation programs around the world, once-widespread and potentially fatal diseases such as tuberculosis, tetanus, measles, and whooping cough have become rare or, in cases such as smallpox and polio, almost eliminated. Why, then, is there a perception in some quarters of the public that immunisation is somehow harmful, a dangerous procedure to be actively resisted? This is the question that award-winning essayist Eula Biss sets out to answer in On Immunity: An Inoculation.

‘Most history is simply lost.’ By means of a regular biographical column in the Jesuit magazine Madonna published over the past twenty-five years, Father Edmund Campion has preserved pieces of Australian personal history that might otherwise have been neglected, if not forgotten altogether. In this, the author’s second collection of biographical sketches (following Great Australian Catholics, 1997), Campion focuses on extraordinary accomplishments achieved within outwardly ordinary Australian lives. Catholics, he demonstrates, have been involved in every aspect of Australian life, not just as priests and nuns but also, increasingly it seems, as lay people.

A priest in Sydney for more than sixty years and a former chair of the Literature Board of the Australia Council, Campion writes within the short lives format without any apparent sense of constraint. The Catholic tradition itself supplies him with impetus as a biographer: ‘We human beings are story-tellers, we pass on our values through the stories we tell. This is particularly true of Catholics, who get their identity through their histories, which they see as salvation history linking them to the saving actions of Christ. So, for Catholics, doing history – passing on the values by telling stories – is a pastoral imperative. We must look where we have been in order to know where we are going.’

Publishers Hardie Grant Egmont established The Ampersand Project in 2011 as a platform for new writing. Erin Gough’s suburban drama/comedy The Flywheel ($19.95 pb, 306 pp, 9781742978178) is the second book to appear under the Ampersand banner. It is a contemporary slice-of-life tale painted with broad comedic strokes. Set in Sydney’s inner-west, the novel follows three months in the life of seventeen-year-old Delilah. Her father’s extended holiday in the Mongolian desert has him out of contact, while her mother, who has long since moved to Melbourne, seems even less available. The Flywheel of the title is the café that Delilah’s father has left in the care of an Irishman. When the latter is deported after visa problems, Delilah is left alone and in charge. Her challenges include, but are not limited to, jump-starting a relationship with neighbouring flamenco instructor Rosa; keeping the café afloat; fending off bullying girls at school; and appearing in court as a witness for her feckless friend Charlie who is up on assault charges.

The Flywheel by Erin Gough

The first-person voice offers writers immediacy, but can allow the narrator to become something of a witness to events and less of an actor in them. Erin Gough doesn’t completely escape this difficulty, and it is in Delilah’s wish to be with Rosa that the problem seems most acute. Since Delilah makes it plain to the reader that she wants to be with Rosa, it is a let-down when Rosa makes the first move: situation solved, but plot-wise something of a deus ex machina. Things become more complicated, and more interesting however, when Rosa tells Delilah that she can’t be open about their relationship, as she lives with her conservative extended family, and Delilah rejects Rosa. But ultimately Delilah is forced to confront her responsibilities to others and not just her own wants. A key theme of The Flywheel is this need to see through our tendency to idealise others and learn to live with imperfection. The Flywheel celebrates individuality and community in an enjoyable and accessible way.