The town of Goroke (population six hundred) stands almost exactly between Melbourne and Adelaide, in the Wimmera region of Victoria. It is, in many ways, a typical small country town. If you drive there in the morning during late spring or early summer, you’ll need to slow the car to avoid kangaroos on the road. Magpies are everywhere. Horses and other livestock mope and sway in front and backyard paddocks just off the main street. Everyone knows everyone, and newcomers to the town, often short of money and used to hardship, either find their niche or move on.

It was formerly a thriving centre for local selectors, surrounded by sheep and cattle farms, but the town, like so many in the region, has slowed to a standstill. The main street is dominated by ramshackle buildings that were once stores; the bank is open just one morning each week; the IGA is barely hanging on; nearby farms have been vacated; and fewer shearers patronise the local hotel. This was closed for a few months early last year – a disaster for any small town – until a local nurse, Brenda, was retrenched from the medical centre down the road and took up the lease.

Goroke is an unusual place for a much-admired Australian writer to live, especially one who is regularly nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature. (An edition of the prestigious journal, ARTES, published by the Swedish Academy, was devoted to him in 2002.) As Gerald Murnane’s long-time friend David Walton said to me, ‘Nobody moves to Goroke as a result of a stroke of good fortune.’

Clive James’s series of memoirs began in 1980 with the Unreliable one. Thirty-five years and four more very funny books later, the Five Lives of Clive have been rounded with a sixth: a slim volume of poems. It is probably also the most reliable, as if, paradoxically, James took more poetic licence when working in prose. The prevailing tone is a long way from the hilarious self-deprecation of the memoirs. Of course, the knowledge that one is to die tomorrow – or at best next year – concentrates the mind. That impending death, and the guilts and regrets that accompany it, belong to the category of what James calls ‘deeper considerations’ in his recent (and indispensable) collection of essays, Poetry Notebook (2014).

The constraints of formal verse also help concentrate the mind, and James is a fine formalist. Witness his recent 500-page translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy (2013). Or just read the first page in his new book, and the title poem it carries: ‘Sentenced to Life’. The pivot of this poem, as it moves from a mood of penance to memories of his homeland, is the two beautiful central stanzas:

My daughter’s garden has a goldfish pool
With six fish, each a little finger long.
I stand and watch them following their rule
Of never touching, never going wrong:
Trajectories as perfect as plain song.

Once, I would not have noticed; nor have known
The name for Japanese anemones,
So pale, so frail. But now I catch the tone
Of leaves. No birds can touch down in the trees
Without my seeing them. I count the bees.

Behind Omonoia Square I check into a cheap hotel, one that mainly sleeps prostitutes and their customers. The receptionist is worn – nicotine fingers, few teeth, sharp cheekbones, gaunt features. His flesh is as green as old tattoos. Leading me down the dank hallway, he lifts up his G-Star Raw T-shirt and scratches a large tattoo of a skull heaving angels from its mouth.

Men argue on the streets below. Various languages adorn closed shops: Bengali, Urdu, Georgian, Albanian. Two prostitutes are hooking strangers in the shadows. They offer a threesome for twenty euros. I drink a small bottle of ouzo in bed as the banter continues. Theo Angelopoulos’s film Eternity and a Day (1998) plays on my laptop. The narrator recites, ‘Time is a child that plays dice on the shore.’

I head to Syntagma Square, where the pensioner Dimitris Christoulas shot himself in 2012, illustrating the human cost of austerity. An old man with placards in A4 plastic pockets attached to him inveighs by the fountain. He needs some kind of surgery that the health care system cannot provide.

A honky barrel organ on a cart passes by. The disjointed cacophony of piano, harpsichord, and bells, stuck in broken repetition, addresses the morning. Akin to the raucous peals and hammers of the instrument, something that is ancient and broken, it is the avidity within this decay that has attracted me to the so-called cradle of democracy – to witness how it somersaults through its current abyss.

Flicking through Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi (1941), I find this wayward premonition of the iron cage of the eurozone:

It is a trap devised by Nature herself for man’s undoing. Greece is full of such death-traps. It is like a strong cosmic note which gives the diapason to the intoxicating light world wherein the heroic and mythological figures of the resplendent past threaten continually to dominate the consciousness … All Greece is diademed with such antinomian spots.

I stroll around the streets that lead from the square. Protest groups in tents occupy a squalid corner, opposing the colony of creditors. The forlorn faces of the protesters reflect their stifled efforts.

Athens shop window (photograph by Scott McCulloch)

Closer to Monastiraki square, the roots of a large tree burst through the pavement. The organ grinder locks eyes with me each time he passes by.

‘Yasou,’ I call out in a darkened hallway. I have walked into a building that supposedly houses an art gallery in Metaxourgeio. All I hear is loud techno. Opening a door I find a deserted dance floor with disco lights and a stage for pole dancing. I stand in the desolate strip club.

Abandoned shops line much of this old promenade. Red lights dangle above the doorways; all these buildings are brothels. There are at least thirty on this one strip. Sitting in a small takeaway shop, I order gyros and watch the trade unfold. A young man wearing a T-shirt with a cheetah on it, a necklace with a live bullet on the end, and carrying a 500ml can of energy drink in his hand walks into one of the buildings with boarded-up windows. A thick-set woman upwards of fifty patrols up and down the promenade, slipping cash and condoms into the hands of women. Her taut lips clasp a hand-rolled cigarette as she commands the air.

‘Leading me down the dank hallway, he lifts up his G-Star Raw T-shirt and scratches a large tattoo of a skull heaving angels from its mouth’

A woman in her late teens walks past, a grey top cropped beneath her breasts. Her belly is tattooed with a triangular design of serpents entangling the Lord’s son. I watch the tattoo move with the skin and think of how the euro has been described as a straitjacket for Greece; how Greece can be thought of as the hefty ballast of the sinking ship that is the eurozone.

A man with two Discmans in his tracksuit pockets passes by mumbling to himself. He is listening to each of them; apparently listening to two different songs. A stream of gibberish spills from his mouth as he tries to sing both of the songs at the same time. He slams his fist down on my table and asks for money.

I leave the café and walk through a city in a state of gradual decomposition. Black chewing gum stains the footpath concrete. A static electrical hum sounds through the streets. I pass an expensive tavern filled with tourists. Across from the restaurant, in broad daylight, a group of four men snort lines off a doorstep.

and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains
like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;
I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.
(Derek Walcott, Omeros)

During the night I am woken by the sound of another guest vomiting in the shared bathroom sink. I decide to leave the hotel.

I board a train to Patras. Several times we are shuffled onto different trains because of electrical faults. Noticing that I am lost, a young woman named Immanuela shows me where to go. We sit quietly and watch the rushing coast. Between the foliage that shimmers through the train window, a man douses kerosene on his lemon trees and ignites them. Immanuela says that if I am going to Patras I should catch a boat to Italy. I tell her that I am here to be in Greece. Immanuela seems confused: ‘Why did you come now?’

‘During the night I am woken by the sound of another guest vomiting in the shared bathroom sink. I decide to leave the hotel’

Our conversation inevitably becomes political. We begin talking about the neo-Nazi/fascist political party, Golden Dawn, whose insignia incorporates the swastika. Many of the party’s politicians have served time. Immanuela describes Golden Dawn’s recruitment techniques. Like many extremist groups, they prey on the impressionable and the vulnerable.

‘They go for the young, teenagers, usually sixteen- or seventeen-year-old boys who don’t know what they want and who know that there are no jobs for them; who have brothers and sisters who have postgraduate degrees and are still unemployed; who are angry with who they are and where they find themselves, without a choice. It works. It’s terrifying.’

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

Immanuela has recently left her native Crete. ‘I would like to host you on the island and show you renowned Cretan hospitality, but I don’t have a house anymore.’

‘Do you want to have sex with me?’ A middle-aged man wearing a pair of underwear and thongs asks in the doorway to my room in Patras.

‘I’m flattered, but I’m fine, thanks.’

He is Portuguese but wanted to leave Lisbon.

‘I came here because there’s no work in Portugal – and there’s no work here. I don’t want to work but I thought it would be easier to live here because it would be cheaper, but it’s not. Is Australia a good country?’

‘It depends on who you …’ I stop. ‘That’s a difficult question.’

‘I think New Zealand is a better country, yes?’

‘Sure.’

In the morning, the receptionist bursts into my room, beaming with confusion: ‘Why didn’t you lock the door?’

I am staying in another hovel: something akin to the Gatwick Hotel in St Kilda, except there are few guests and it is in Patras. The doors to the rooms slam on their own volition. The outside of the fridge is lined with black mould. Inside the fridge sits a pair of filthy socks. An old phone rings erratically throughout the night. The owner sits on his bed eating small fish and watching television.

The one-eyed man in the other room screams ‘pousti malaka’ at his dog for most of the time. A fuzzy television tries to play the news. At least twenty plastic bags are on his bed. He sees me and says, ‘Philo friend friend philo, welcome!’ He kicks a dustpan down the stairs, goes back to his room, and continues to scream at his dog.

It rains the whole time I am in Patras. I watch it pelt into the Mediterranean and turn the air into acrid colours. Night falls. Half-empty trucks file down the orange-lit highway and slowly board the ships for other countries.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

I make my way back to Athens. On the bus to the train station I see a drained swimming pool with tall stalks of yellow weeds spiking from the floor tiles. Three young boys sit by the pool on their BMXs, looking in different directions from one another, doing nothing.

The road is sublime. The water and the land and the islands that resemble volcanic icebergs intersect and skewer one another, almost lacerating the sky. House after house have their shutters drawn. I recall someone saying that as many as 300,000 Greeks have left Greece since the crisis.

A woman comes up to me on the station and asks in English: ‘Are you Orthodox?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say.

The woman hovers silently by my side. The regional train pulls in with its elastic gait.

‘Night falls. Half-empty trucks file down the orange-lit highway and slowly board the ships for other countries’

I accidentally break into a deceased estate. Orthodox icons and decaying family photos line the walls. There is dust in the bath and an unmade bed. The power and water are still on. I wash my face as shafts of parched light cuts through the twisted venetians. I wonder how many deceased estates and empty houses there are like these around. I return to the stairwell and replace the lock.

I meet Maria Rota and the stray dog she has adopted. Maria, a psychologist, volunteers at the Metropolitan, a free medical clinic that has opened since austerity strangled healthcare funding.

I tell her that it seemed strange watching the recent election from abroad. All that many of us could gather was that the political situation was just as bad, if not worse, than economic realities. The hard-left party of Syriza seemed to appear from nowhere. I tell her that it was inspirational to watch Syriza being sworn in; it encouraged me to think that the dire state of Australian politics could be changed.

Maria notes the comparison. ‘In Australia I always felt like I was doing something wrong.’ I laugh. ‘Things happened because they had to. Greece has to figure itself out internally. Then Germany will be a breeze.’

As we sip our coffee Maria constantly greets passing friends. She continues: ‘History plays a role for how we have gotten to this position. There was no renaissance here – we were occupied by the Ottomans at the time. We’ve had a tough history – wars with others and ourselves; not to mention the time of the generals – but it should be a reality more than an excuse.’ Maria pauses. ‘What happens when you give a seventeen-year-old everything?’

I/   came/   to a ward of horses,
bloated on cake, relaxed in front of, t.v.s
the king of kings, their therapy
wax horses, wax horses
the city is burning its horses
(π.O., ‘Supermarket’)

Convoys of riot police buses with caged windows storm through the streets, en route to the first day of the Golden Dawn trial.

I visit the anarchist neighbourhood of Exarcheia. I see an abandoned butcher shop. The meat has vanished but the smell lingers. Next to the shop a man shoots up heroin. A Roma couple laugh hysterically as they run around a dumpster and throw large chunks of pork fat at each other.

In the main square of Exarcheia, students, immigrants, drunks, and homeless people of all ages sit in the sun, swilling beer and smoking hashish. Everyone seems to know one another. In the centre of the square is a statue of a naked winged baby doused in black paint.

(photograph by Scott McCulloch)

I cross town. On the metro a man has passed out with an open cap on the floor beneath him. There is a chunk of hair the size of a fist missing from the back of his skull, exposing a purple-white circle of grafted flesh.

I meet the actor, artist, and multi-platform theatre-maker, Marilli Mastrantoni, who tells me about the acronym of PIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain); it circulates among the wealthier countries of the EU. Marilli likens the crisis to a stroke. I think of an ambulance broken down in a field of poppies.

As dusk rolls over the city, lights beam upon the Acropolis.

The trial was adjourned.

I check into a cheap hotel in Metaxourgeio. It is close to one in the morning and Reception is empty. A thin man drinking beers asks, ‘You looking for a room, brother?’ He talks fast, eyes darting to something above my head. He checks me into a dorm and asks me where I am from.

‘I recall someone saying that as many as 300,000 Greeks have left Greece since the crisis’

‘I thought you were Greek for a minute, brother. I know there’re a lot of Greeks living in Melbourne. Australians always tell me how Melbourne is the third biggest Greek city, after Athens and Thessaloniki. You know that, brother? The Australians always feel like they have to say that. Anyway, my name’s Mehdi, I’m from Tunisia. You hungry, brother?’

I buy beer and Mehdi cooks pasta with bolognese sauce. He works the night-shift: twelve hours a night for ten euros. ‘It is not enough, brother, but it is more than what a lot of people have. Besides,’ he whispers: ‘I’m not supposed to be here.’

We drink into the night as plumes of smoke and insects make knots around the light in the kitchen. Mehdi smuggled himself out of Tunisia when the Arab Spring swept through his country. With his eyelids gently drooping as the alcohol and the late night takes hold, Mehdi says: ‘Nobody predicted what happened in my country … with the Spring. I think it could happen here.’

I am no longer in Greece. I continue to follow the saga of the crisis. A contrite Athens seems to be the desire of the EU empire. The crisis has paved the way for much prejudice and racism and accusation; as though the populous should be held accountable for the profligacy of their government. The decay and misery I witnessed indicated that Greek society is in ruinous flux. But energy still pulses amid the oblivion.

I pick up Henry Miller’s novel and read: ‘Greece has emancipated itself as a country, a nation, a people, in order to continue as the luminous carrefour of a changing humanity.’

With this in mind, but resisting any implied nationalism, I gaze on as the Greek crisis alters the future of Europe.

In an online video, Alexis Tsipras is speaking at a conference in Zagreb. Mehdi’s voice is echoed as Tsipras espouses his wishes for a ‘Mediterranean Spring’.

Despite the prospect of Greece being a realm of ancient waste – suspended into generations of economic collapse – democracy prevailed on 5 July when the great majority of Greeks voted ‘Oxi’ in a historic referendum. Yanis Varoufakis has stepped down as the finance minister. ‘Grexit’ and the restoration of the drachmas are distinct possibilities. Yet it is all purely guesswork from now. Alarm is rife throughout the eurozone.

I think of Angelopoulos’s narrator: ‘Time is a child that plays dice on the shore.’

Just as there are ways of writing short story collections, there are also ways of reading them. I used to be a rummager, picking through collections, seeking out the title piece, dipping in here and there to ascertain the feel of the stories, then reading the book from start to finish. Conscious now of the architecture of collections, of the fact that the author has probably wrestled with the order of the stories, I start at the beginning. Besides, there is no title story in Peripheral Vision, though it is an apt title which captures much of the subtlety of Paddy O’Reilly’s handling of the form.

Free settlement in Australia from 1788 to the 1850s is an old and favourite topic for historians in this country. It has engaged historical imagination for nearly two centuries, starting with William Charles Wentworth’s A Statistical, Historical, and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales, published in London in 1819. Many other histories were written during the period itself, for all sorts of reasons. Here was a type of creation story whose patterning had implications for the long term and which therefore had to be understood.

Unsurprisingly, the story had little shape to it until its timespan was over. But then, straightaway, writers (Samuel Sidney, John West) came forward to suggest what it had all meant. Party politicians did so too. With liberal democracy emerging in the 1850s, much of the argument had as its subtext the story of the previous sixty years, with the old élite, the ‘bunyip aristocracy’, condemned for the power they had accumulated through free land grants and convict labour.

Since World War II, the process has moved up a gear. Copious beforehand, from the 1950s research and writing about pre-democratic, pre-industrial settler-Australia has been superabundant. Very soon the focus moved from liberal democracy to centralised continental nation-building and national independence, and for the rest of the twentieth century that preoccupation framed everything else. Nation versus empire, or, as Manning Clark put it (after Henry Lawson), ‘The Old Dead Tree and the Young Tree Green’, was not the only argument. But it had the driving seat.

‘I have never met an Aussie I didn’t like.’ The half-compliment was the best President Richard Nixon could muster during a restrained exchange with Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in the Oval Office in July 1973. After the turbulent build-up to this meeting, rivetingly conveyed in James Curran’s history Unholy Fury: Whitlam and Nixon at War, one almost expects Nixon to add the disclaimer ‘until now’.

The eight months between Whitlam’s election and his brief meeting with Nixon at the White House were some of the most tumultuous in Australian diplomatic history. In Unholy Fury, Curran renders the alliance’s downward spiral in intoxicating detail, drawing upon recently declassified material to reveal just how close the central pillar of Australian foreign policy – the Australia–America alliance – came to collapsing.

The rift began with a letter. In the wake of Labor’s electoral victory, on 21 December 1972 Whitlam penned a note to the White House in which he expressed ‘grave concern’ over the US decision to bomb Hanoi and Haiphong and appealed to the United States and North Vietnam as equals, urging them ‘to return to serious negotiations’. These were strong words from a small power to a superpower, and they were not received kindly. ‘Whitlam had done the unthinkable,’ Curran explains. ‘He had put the United States on the same level as its communist enemy.’ Nixon’s National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, described the letter as ‘an absolute outrage’ and ‘a cheap little manoeuvre’. Nixon agreed: it was ‘one hell of a thing’ to do. They decided to ‘freeze’ Whitlam ‘for a few months’ so that he would ‘get the message’.

It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album was first published in 1987, on the eve of the bicentenary of white settlement in Australia, when many versions of the story of Australia were advanced and debated. Thea Astley’s book presents a family, the Laffeys, as a microcosm of the national story. It is a novel made up of stories told by Connie, an ageing woman, as she mulls over ‘pictures from the family album’, covering a period from the 1860s to the 1980s.

The title refers to Mango, an imaginary small town rather like Kuranda, near Cairns in far north Queensland, where Thea Astley lived for some time, and which is the heartland of her fiction’s landscapes. The rain signifies the onset of the tropical wet season, which brings regeneration after months of intense heat in the ‘build-up’ following the dry months. The Wet can also bring cyclones and floods, destruction as well as renewal. The rhythm of these seasonal changes runs through the human emotions dramatised in It’s Raining in Mango. The book’s epigraph is a song from the Oenpelli region (further west, in Arnhem Land) which welcomes the rain as ‘it falls on my sweetheart’, on the land that longs for it.

A short preface dramatises the beginning of Connie’s movement back to recall the past, via the family album. ‘A chanting mob of greenies’ demonstrate against a new road being hacked through the rainforest. Her son Reever has lashed himself to a tree, fifty feet above ground. Connie runs down from her house to remonstrate with him, but falls and is concussed. In a confused state, she is struck by the power of the idea of home, which stayed with her whenever she travelled: ‘a sense of self lamented its lost sense of place.’ Despite all the people she has met outside of this place, ‘only the family as she knows it has cohesion, provides a core’. Mentally listing them, from her grandparents down to her son, she thinks of the family as intimately bound up with this place: ‘Laffeys. In this rainforest triangle, tented in green. Bedouins of the sticky leaf.’ Awareness of her age and her present frailty, and the repeated phrase, ‘She goes back to the start of things,’ all create a sense of urgency that carries the reader with Connie into the stories which follow.

The stories create a discontinuous narrative of the Laffey family’s history in the far north since the 1860s. Like Astley’s own grandfather, Cornelius Laffey arrived in Queensland from Canada to work as a journalist and eventually deserted his wife and children. In the first story, ‘How to get sacked’, Connie remembers herself as a child, begging her grandmother, Jessica Olive, for stories about Cornelius. ‘He’d charm the halo off a saint,’ she was told, ‘Or at least make the saint wear it tipped sideways.’ Taking his young family from Sydney up to the northernmost settlement, Cooktown, Cornelius gets a job on the local paper and continues on his merry way, much to Jessica Olive’s distress. Even more distressing, however, are the family’s experiences of the even more remote goldfields, and of the massacre of local Aboriginal people by diggers. George, their son, is traumatised by the discovery of a ‘bonefield’ of unburied Aboriginal men. ‘Are blacks worth less?’ the child asks. Cornelius writes articles in condemnation of the way ‘Blacks are now being shot on sight as if they were some pernicious vermin’ – and is sacked for his efforts.

It's Raining in Mango (Penguin edition, 1989)

Buy this bookThe other stories focus on various members of the family – George and his sister Nadine, who has a child when she is fourteen and runs away from home, ending up working in a brothel; Jessica Olive bringing up that child, her grandson Harry, alone after Nadine’s death and Cornelius’s disappearance; George and his wife Mag and their children, Connie and Will; Harry and his wife Clytie, who give Connie and Will a home after their parents’ deaths, during the 1930s Depression. As the stories progress, there is a more consistent focus on Connie and her brother Will, coming to a tragic climax in the penultimate story, ‘Old Man in a Dry Month’ (the title phrase is taken from T.S. Eliot’s poem ‘Gerontion’, signifying not just old age but spiritual dryness and despair). This climax happens at the time of the protest against the making of a road through the rainforest, with which the series began. The final story, ‘Source Material’, focuses on Connie’s son Reever, now about forty years old, who leaves Connie and home in Mango soon after Will’s death, to walk even further north.

At intervals the lives of an Aboriginal family, Bidgi Mumbler and his descendants, touch on those of the Laffeys: they may not feature in the white settler family’s photo album but their focal presence in three of the stories, where they intersect with the Laffeys, is a reminder of their continuing presence, and of the violent dispossession that they suffered at the hands of white colonists, settlers, and diggers alike. The initial stories of massacre are followed by incidents of child removal (‘Heart is where the home is’), racial discrimination and brutal beatings to which the law turns a blind eye (‘It’s Raining in Mango’).

Violence is the central theme of these historical stories – of lawlessness on the mining fields, of poverty, of returned soldiers after World War I walking the roads looking for work and being beaten by the police (‘Right off the map’) and returned soldiers traumatised by World War II like Will (‘Committing Sideways’). Violence is also present in the smaller cruelties practised in institutions. Closer to the present, Australia’s violent history manifests itself in the greed of the ‘developers’ who tear down the rainforest, and in the way the ‘family’ of drop-outs cadge off Will and mock him.

At the same time – and this is why reading Mango is a pleasurable experience – it is a history of human types and events that are often comically outrageous. As well as Jessica Olive’s tirade against the local priest, there is the brothel where Nadine fetches up, washed out to sea during a cyclone with its cargo of singing prostitutes; there are Harry Laffey’s multiple seductions and his violent death (his wife publishes a death notice which reads: ‘husband of Clytie Roseanne, mourned by Lucie Compers, Martha Zweig, Etta Panici ... and others too numerous to mention’); there is Chant the false prophet and his followers, there is impoverished Billy Mumbler, gaoled for tax evasion, and many more. The Far North is ‘a kind of human confetti’, as Reever sees it: ‘Beach hermits, crazy ferals, tin scratchers, yacht freaks, madmen still fossicking for gold in tableland backwaters, dole gurus in Mango’s hills, southern sharpies declared bankrupt there but mysteriously solvent here, junkies and dope dealers … – an army of workers, scroungers, pseudo-saints and the real thing’.

At least some of this ‘human confetti’, however, have made their home here for generations, like the Laffeys, and as Will inverts the old saying, ‘Heart is where the home is’. They belong, if they belong anywhere, here in the North, managing a pub (Jessica Olive), working a small farm (George, then Harry) or a garden (Will), nursing at the local hospital and sometimes teaching music (Connie), doing odd jobs and hanging out with the hippies and protestors (Reever). Their belonging is implicitly at odds with the mythology of heroic white settlers: Jessica Olive is scornful of the ‘pioneer fantasy’ that underpins her son George’s desire to farm; Will reflects that ‘this country eats up towns’, small inland settlements ‘the wind-shot, bush-pole scrubbers tied into settler hearts and nailed down with the excitement of vision’.

A different kind of belonging to the land keeps the Mumblers together despite the best efforts of police and welfare workers to deprive them of each other, as they had long ago been deprived of their traditional hunting grounds. ‘Heart is where the home is’ for Nelly Mumbler, when she returns to the camp rather than accept George’s offer of a home for herself and her man, which might keep her baby safe. Billy Mumbler’s mother sends him a letter when he’s in gaol: ‘You come soon, you homes hear, its rainin in Mango.’

The Laffeys’ is a tentative kind of belonging. At the end, Reever recalls all the family stories, including Connie’s account of her wartime years, her sexual initiation and her brief marriage to his American father, who died at Iwo Jima. By now he shares his mother’s sense of being made up of many selves, of Jessica Olive, Cornelius, George, Nadine, Harry. He resolves to go back to his ‘source material’, to walk as far north ‘up to Charco and in to the Palmer’, the far north river settlement where the family saga started. He sets off on foot, with only a backpack.

‘Suicide haunts the stories in Mango’

Reever’s decision recalls the desperate swagman’s intention to head north ‘right off the map’, but in that earlier story the unnamed man’s desire for an extreme destination strongly suggested that suicide was his aim. Suicide haunts the stories in Mango – first this swagman, then Harry’s death, described by Connie as a possible case of ‘committing sideways’, her euphemism for suicide. Then there is the young man washed up on the beach in ‘Build-Up’, whom Connie resuscitates, only to hear his first words: ‘Thanks for nothing.’ Last and most tragically, her brother Will pays all his bills, makes her a farewell visit and drives away with his rifle: ‘She will never hear the shot.’ Reever’s departure, we surmise, is his way of grieving for Will, who appears to him, ‘broken in a spiritual two beside the path where he’s standing. Will, ankle-deep in mud, pleading for something.’ Connie’s grief takes a different form: ‘Even at the end of things, she is still looking for a reason.’

Connie is the central consciousness of this story sequence, the one who is capable of thinking herself into the position of each of her family members in turn. But it is her brother Will whose life gets the most extended treatment. He is the focal character of three chapters, and he emerges as a tragic figure. Always a loner, he is bullied at school for his love of music. As an adult, traumatised by his wartime experiences, aware of his sexual attraction to other men but hating the thought of ‘the passing insults from louts’, he lives most intensely with his music, his painting and, eventually, the garden he builds at Mango: ‘it was as if the fecundity missing in his personal life transferred itself to the luxuriance of his park.’ His closest encounter with another human being, however, is with his sister Connie, when as adults they swim naked and make love at a moonlit beach. This extraordinary incident Astley treats with understated sympathy, unlike any other sexual encounter in her fiction: ‘They walked back to the house parted by what had happened. There should have been horror somewhere but there wasn’t quite that. Will felt as if something had entered his life and then drained it.’

Eventually, in his sixties, Will becomes infatuated with one of the young men in the ‘family’ of drop-outs who are camped in his garden. This beautiful young man (his ‘skin glistened like tanned silk’) is a talented musician. He is also a callous user of others. He plays on Will’s attraction to him, while the other family members look on with dismay or amusement. It is his girlfriend, Flute, who flings the first insult at Will: ‘You’ve got the hots for him, haven’t you, mister? ... And it isn’t any good, is it, because you’re not making any play, are you? ... You ought to hear the things he says about you! God, you’re a laugh!’ But far worse – ‘the ultimate debasement’ – is when Buckle turns on him when he tries to join the family in their protest against the road builders: ‘Piss off, old man.’

Connie rescues Will from this humiliating encounter, but nothing she says can rescue his faith in life. ‘It’s as if all my nerve centres have been wired up again and wrong,’ he tells her. In response to her suggestion that her way of coping with old age might work for him – ‘I go back and back. There’s safety there. Today is yesterday already’ – Will says, ‘I can’t move out of this stinking present.’ At the end, he drives away from Connie, and from the old homestead where she is keeper of their family’s past. As he is leaving he ‘raced up the steps as if he were twenty again and had come to some decision, and, putting his arms round her, hugged her tightly and warmly and said, ‘I love you, Con’. This reminds Connie of ‘that day, that night, forty years ago’ and she is frightened. Nothing more is said, but readers know, from Will’s sleepless musings at the opening of this chapter, that he has indeed come to a fateful decision. Yet a feeling of peace accompanies his thought that this ‘dear little planet’ affirms his faith in God, and he finds himself whistling Schubert’s ‘The Winter Journey’, which reminds him of waiting for the Wet to begin, the renewal process, while at the same time suggesting that his journey of despair, his Winterreise, is ended.

Connie understands a great deal about the brother she loves, but she appears not to understand what bearing his homosexuality might have had on this flight from himself and others; nor is she aware of the danger he courted in taking in the hippie ‘family’ and falling so hopelessly for Buckle. Astley invites readers to understand this, however, by showing Will’s inner reality directly and at length. In this way she ‘frames’ Connie’s limitations as a storyteller.

There is another example of this kind of critical narrative framing to be seen in the story called ‘Heart is where the home is’. It alludes to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal children: George and his wife Mag hide Nelly Mumbler’s baby from the invading police who intend to take him away, and then offer her and her man a safe home on their farm. Nelly cannot accept: ‘Don’t want to leave my family,’ she sobs. George does not understand why: ‘God love us, they’re only a mile up the river.’ But ‘family’ for her is:

The old men old women uncles aunts cousins brothers sisters tin humpies bottles dogs dirty blankets tobacco handouts fights river trees all the tribe’s remnants and wretchedness, destruction and misery.

Her second skin now.

‘Not same,’ she whispered. And she cried them centuries of tribal dream in those two words. ‘Not same.’

Nelly’s idea of family is radically different from George’s: in such respects the two cultures are not comparable, and this difference is perhaps the hardest thing for settler Australians to understand.

Astley attempts to draw attention to this limitation in her novel. By ‘framing’ Connie as a storyteller with wide sympathies but incomplete understanding, she suggests a significant parallel between the two kinds of stories, the dominant version of the nation, and the photo album version of the family. Both nation and family tell a story that by definition must exclude anything that is radically other. Where the settler Australian national story excludes the racial other, the Indigenous people, the traditional family story excludes the sexual other. Will is loved but he is ‘not same’, not fully understood.

‘Astley was aware that by including Aboriginal characters she risked being criticised for romanticising if she wrote sympathetically, or for being racist if she sounded critical’

Astley was aware that by including Aboriginal characters she risked being criticised for romanticising if she wrote sympathetically, or for being racist if she sounded critical, but in Mango she went ahead and made Bidgi Mumbler and his family the focal characters in three stories, in language which attempts to represent their Aboriginal point of view. This striking attempt in Mango to represent race relations as part of the Laffey family history and, by extension, of the national story made a strong impression on readers when the book appeared. The extreme North, in all its singularity and specificity, became, in Astley’s hands, a metaphor for the whole nation and its sense of history. Incidents of dispossession and dispersal of the indigenous population, which had been written out of official histories, were being written back in.

Women, too, were placed at the centre rather than at the periphery of national stories. As critic Julie Mullaney puts it, family history, inseparable from place, becomes a metaphor for national history or, rather, is framed by the national. Connie is ‘both archive and archivist’ of family, as she feels herself being Jessica Olive and the others. Connie recognises how the dominant national story leaves out the reality of settler women’s lives, and her narrative emphasises how the women in particular ‘embody those qualities of resistance and rebellion that mark the Laffey family’s contribution to the counter-history of settlement existence’.

With this book (her tenth), Thea Astley draws together all her strengths of language, narrative and characterisation. In the story sequence there are continuing connections among the characters, and a strong narrative line shaped towards the climax, which allows it to be read as a novel. The structure allows her to develop character only as far as is necessary to dramatise the ‘explosive moment’ of each story – and ample scope, still, to introduce plenty of her trademark characters, the ‘nutters’ and oddballs that she loves. Above all, the presiding female consciousness of Connie, a woman of her own age and sensibility, enables Astley to achieve an astonishing mixture of comedy and tragedy, satire and violence.

References

Astley, Thea. It’s Raining in Mango: Pictures from the Family Album, Viking, 1987

Mullaney, Julie. ‘“Passing Ghosts”: Reading the Family Album in Thea Astley’s It’s Raining in Mango and Reaching Tin River.’ Australian Studies, 16, no. 1, 2001, 23–44

Sheridan, Susan and Paul Genoni (eds), Thea Astley’s Fictional Worlds. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2006

Webby, Elizabeth. ‘Men, Women, Black, White – Astley Marks 1988’. Sydney Morning Herald June 25, 1988

Zeller, Robert. ‘Tales of the Austral Tropics’ in C.A. Cranston and Robert Ziller, eds. The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers. Rodopi, 2007

Silent Shock is an ambitious, important book. It is a work of history, a work of journalism, and a forensic exposé of hideous corporate negligence, all woven around the lives of one modest Melbourne family.

Former journalist turned lawyer Michael Magazanik was one of the dozens of lawyers, barristers, and researchers who worked on a recent class action against Grünenthal, the manufacturer of thalidomide, and Distillers, the drug’s distributor. The legal action was taken on behalf of more than one hundred people in Australia and New Zealand who were born with serious birth defects as a result of their mothers taking the German-made sedative.

Thalidomide was sold from 1957 until late 1961. It killed or disabled between ten thousand and fifteen thousand babies around the world. Thousands more were miscarried or stillborn.

Pregnant women were prescribed the drug for morning sickness, anxiety, and sleeplessness. Thalidomide was marketed as ‘outstandingly safe’. Its success shows how few options women had then.

Recently I drove east from Perth through wheat belt country to the Helena and Aurora Ranges, past Cunderin, Kellerberrin, and Koolyanobbing, towns whose names echo the rhythms of the landscape; past the shimmering salt pan that was once Lake Deborah East; down rutted tracks which changed abruptly from red earth to yellow sand; past the ravages of iron ore mines to the sacred Aboriginal ochre quarries of Bungalbin Hill. This is the wheat belt region of Western Australia to which John Kinsella appears to lay claim as surely as Tim Winton claims the coast.

Kinsella is a prolific and laurelled poet, essayist, author, and editor. His poetry, in particular, has been variously praised for its sparse realism, attention to detail, lyricism, and metaphoric resonance.

The twenty-seven stories in this latest collection are seldom longer than a few pages. Themes and images – white imperialism and bone-white silos, red earth and the damage humans wreak on a fragile ecology – are recognisable from Kinsella’s poetry. The intensity and precision of the poetry is, however, rarely matched by the prose of Crow’s Breath. The scrupulous narrator of the poems is replaced by a number of not entirely successful voices, almost as if Kinsella has challenged himself to reproduce overheard conversations, or to elaborate on snippets gleaned from a newspaper’s ‘OddSpot’.

What are the implications of the ever-accelerating revolution in information communication technology on our lives? Is the Internet a force for good, for increased freedom and democracy? Or are we so in thrall to the prophets of Silicon Valley that we have lost sight of the perils that lie in ‘big data’, the extension of algorithms and quantification into every nook and cranny of our lives?

For Evgeny Morozov the prognosis is at best mixed and at worst pretty awful. To Save Everything, Click Here follows more or less directly on from his bestseller The Net Delusion, published in 2011. The hallmarks of that book are still on display here: an astonishing grasp not only of the vast literature that concerns the impact of digital technologies on our lives, but also the canon of political and philosophical work that should make us shudder about where all of this is heading. It also displays that fine sense of the absurdities of everyday life and the frailties ofthe subjects caught in the snare of the ever-rolling bandwagon of technological progress and innovation, that made the first text a must read.

These are books that can be savoured on their own terms as correctives to the wilder flights of techno-fantasy; but they also have a deeper and perhaps darker undertone to them which forms an interesting counterpoint to the fascination with the myriad ways in which digital culture is changing the world around us. Two arguments in particular stand out in terms of Morozov’s contribution to date.

An official account of a naval battle off the coast of Crete on 22 May 1941 includes reference to a ‘friendly fire’ incident when ‘HMS Orion was … repeatedly hit by 40mm shots from HMS Dido, which, in the maelstrom, ended up shooting at her comrade’. A few days later, during the evacuation from Heraklion, the crippled HMS Imperial had to be scuttled and, according to one version, some Australian soldiers were left behind on Crete and others went down with the ship.

In the ‘Author’s Note’ to Archipelago of Souls, Gregory Day cautions that, although ‘the research that has gone into this novel has been extensive, it is a work of the imagination and should not be read as history’, but quite possibly his considerable knowledge of the catastrophic 1941 Crete campaign included the separate fates of the Orion, Dido, and Imperial. Fragments of their sorry story, ‘rearranged or relocated’, as Day puts it, could credibly have contributed to his fictional construction of the central event of this novel, the one which haunts the protagonist, Wesley Cress, and, after the war, helps fuel his inclination for reclusiveness and guarded silence.

For all that it intriguingly echoes aspects of the historical events, however, Archipelago of Souls is unquestionably ‘a work of the imagination’, and it is a daring and often poetic imagination that conducts the narrative of Cress’s Cretan ordeal and its peacetime aftermath. He begins with the ‘true horrors of the German landing’:

the shock came from the open sky when hundreds of coloured brollies of the Fallschirmjaeger suddenly appeared over the water.
       From that moment on, Hell ruled the island. Tiny Freyberg had expected the Germans to come by sea but instead from the air the brollies came down in a slow insidious drift. Were they dots in front of our eyes, a mirage of the heat? No, they came and then they began to land, to become indisputably real. They fell into quarries and fountains, onto beaches and spits, into lanes and backyards and into dried-up riverbeds.

Why do you write?

I write for justice, and for the pleasure that comes from creating music with words.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

I am, especially since having a second baby. He wakes me up all night, so my dreams are brief and intense, between short bursts of sleep. Sound like fun?

Where are you happiest?

Swimming, reading in bed, in a dark cinema, with my sons, or in front of a fire with my husband. And eating pancakes.

Our national literary landscape would be seriously depleted without The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. It jump-started the careers of Tim Winton, Julienne van Loon, and Andrew McGahan, authors who have been willing to explore the harsher aspects of Australia’s identity, however confronting these journeys may sometimes have been. Others, such as Gillian Mears, Danielle Wood, and Eva Sallis (née Hornung) wove lyrical meditations on loss and identity into their début novels. With the exception of Wood, who has since straddled styles and formats, they continue to do so to this day.

More recent Vogel-winning novels from Christine Piper and Paul D. Carter explored regional politics past and present in their respective works, After Darkness (2014) and Eleven Seasons (2012). Most striking about these texts was their ability to transcend their setting, be it temporal or literal, and to make astute commentary about society, and more poignantly, the permanence of memory.

Much of the work of past Vogel winners have belonged to the genre of literary realism. Murray Middleton’s When There’s Nowhere Else to Run continues this trend, but it also represents a departure from the norm. Alongside the 1986 winner, Robin Walton’s Glace Fruits, it is one of only two short-story collections to win the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award in its more than thirty-year history.

This début novel brings 1920s Sydney to life through a fairy-tale lens, highlighting the city’s romance, its magic and its mystery. In alternating point-of-view chapters, the stories of three misfits unfold. Ari is a European Jewish refugee, raised in Sydney by his devout uncle, who wants him to become a rabbi. But Ari has other plans: an admirer of Houdini, he dreams of becoming a professional magician. Billy is a conman, a charming drifter who delights in seducing women and parting fools from their money. Ari and Billy are both drawn to the stunningly beautiful Lily, a run-away who uses a false name and hides terrible secrets.

In spite of their cultural differences, Lily and Ari begin to kindle a tentative romance. But Billy’s obsession with Lily threatens their happiness; determined to seduce and possess her, he schemes and plots in an attempt to undermine the couple’s new bond.

One of the few Australian-born female sculptors of the early twentieth century was a Ballarat girl, Dora Ohlfsen, who went to Berlin in 1892, at the age of twenty-three, to study music and found herself three years later in St Petersburg studying the art of the medallion. She was in Russia because she had fallen in love with the Russian-born, German-speaking Elena von Kügelgen, who had connections with the Russian court. There Dora met the Grand Duke George Mikhailovich, who, besotted by medals and coins, was the foremost Russian collector of his day. In Australia, the so-called glyptic arts were barely recognised, but in Europe, the ancient art of medal-making was alive and well, and relatively lucrative. When, early in the new century, Dora and Elena moved to Rome to escape the increasingly volatile political situation in Russia, Dora made the form her own. Her success is evident in the striking image of a naked woman in bas-relief, arms uplifted, long hair streaming out before her, on the cover of Eileen Chanin and Steven Miller’s Awakening: Four Lives in Art.

Dora is one of the four women profiled in Chanin and Miller’s book, all of whom were active in the arts in the first half of the twentieth century. The other three, like Dora, left Australia in young adulthood to build lives and careers overseas: Louise Dyer in Paris, Clarice Zander in London, and Mary Cecil Allen in New York. Like Dora, they were intrepid women – talented, unconventional, and today, largely unknown. In their brief introduction, Chanin and Miller write that one of their objects is simply to recognise the ‘remarkable lives and achievements’ of these women. They further assert that the women’s stories ‘throw new light on the milieu in which [they] lived and show the difference they made to it’ – though this is a claim they do not develop or defend.

The Economist’s foreign correspondent John Hooper turns to a quintessentially English theme: Italians. Italians seem to be a sort of recurring obsession, a presence that periodically intrudes into the English imaginary. The cultural construction of Italy is a particularly sensitive and timely topic in the context of debates about the future of Europe. The attempt to define and assess any EU member’s identity and culture is a politically strategic intervention. At one point, Hooper rather misleadingly frames his project as sorting ‘myth’ from ‘fact’. In truth, all identities are collectively imagined by the people themselves, and by outsiders, sometimes to similar, but more often to dissimilar, effect.

The author is at pains to identify legacies of historical and geopolitical antecedents in the Italian national character. Like a pearl which is the mollusc’s healing response to, and memory of, invasion, Italian identity has covered the abjectness and humiliation of a violent past with layers of nacre. To the perennial geopolitical debate (Where is Italy? Who are the Italians?) Hooper adds the intriguing suggestion that Italians are best understood if Italy is seen as foreign to itself, since it has always played the part of pawn ‘in a chess game in which the important moves were made on other parts of the European board’.

Such powerlessness explains the valorisation of the furbizia – the suspicious cleverness which rises to political ascendancy. The lack of self-determination is evident in the development of the popular mentality in a pragmatic rather than principled direction. Modern Italy is therefore as much, if not more, the heir of Agostino Depretis as of Giuseppe Garibaldi. Depretis, the dominant political figure of his day, was the brutally pragmatic author of the policy of trasformismo – encouraging betrayal from the party of one’s election to a rival.

Weather in which I might be
elsewhere, lounging
book in hand, Tim Tams
(dark, perhaps), tea a given,

instead of the uphill pram push of swaying kids,
singing drunkenly –
what a coachman circa 1840
or his horse felt, probably,

All those years
of trying to understand
which of this is her
which of this is me?
Getting at the truth
was always so confusing
amidst her craziness;
how to separate?
And though the shrink said
put her in a box –
I never quite could

Orpheus – composer and singer of his own song – is regarded as the founding figure of opera. One of the most arresting images of Orpheus is of his death – his dismembered head on his lyre floating down a river, still singing. Opera’s history is dogged by its own death wish; the art form has been pronounced dying, or even dead almost from its inception, yet zombie-like it refuses to die, and like Orpheus’s head, its song continues. Despite frequently being written off as nothing more than an art form belonging in a museum, more opera is being performed than ever before, and technological advances in the last hundred years have radically changed the way opera is consumed. In time, opera houses – temples or museums – might well disappear, but the art form still continue to flourish.

If opera has been in a constant state of dying, then the fundamental feature of this lengthy demise is the contest between words and music. ‘In the beginning was the word’, and premised on the centrality of the word has been a continuous dialectic between word and music, the successful operas achieving a unique synthesis. In almost biblical terms, every great operatic reform movement has argued the need to return to its founding principle in the word, but music has proven to be an overwhelming foe.

The history of opera spans more than four hundred years, and The Oxford Handbook of Opera almost matches the length of the subject, weighing in at well over a thousand pages. During the last twenty or more years, opera has become the site of a wide range of scholarly activity; Lydia Goehr in her chapter, ‘The Concept of Opera’, presents a broad-ranging overview of the territory, arguing that a history ‘may be written from different disciplinary and interdisciplinary standpoints’, including ‘genre, or opera’s relation to the individual arts, or on its constituent media, means, technologies … or on opera’s contribution to ideas such as work, genius or virtuosity; singing, diction, or acting; performativity, dramaturgy or theatricality’. She suggests that one may write opera’s history ‘along the lines of myth, religion, humanism, or secularization’, or in terms that reveal ‘the changing status of composers, performers, singers critics, and audiences’.

Why Acting Matters has on its cover the face of an ape; well, actually it’s Andy Serkis playing Caesar, ‘the top ape’ in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). The point of this rather unexpected image from a movie not discussed in the book is, the blurb tells us, that ‘acting is baked into our primate DNA’. These two books, however, by elder statesmen in their respective fields, are concerned not with our primate ancestors, but with the particular form of acting to be found in theatre and cinema. Both have published important reference books: Stanley Wells has the Oxford Dictionary of Shakespeare (1998) among his many publications, while David Thomson’s other career as a ‘celebrity podiatrist’ (as he jokingly refers to himself) has not prevented him publishing far and wide, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film (1975) which is now in its sixth edition.

Wells’s Great Shakespeare Actors are thirty-nine in number, only ten of whom are women, a disparity only partly explained by the fewer female roles created by Shakespeare, who assumed that boys, not women, would be playing them. Inevitably there will be arguments about who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’, while it almost goes without saying that the list is Anglocentric, the few Americans to be included having played at some stage of their careers in London.

An introductory essay earnestly considers what makes a great actor. Wells points to Michael Billington’s identification of ‘the androgynous, bisexual quality that invariably underpins great acting’, but does not pursue it; instead he provides what is almost like a shopping list, which includes make-up, props, memory, and vocal prowess. When we get to ‘facial expressions’, this identikit of the great actor risks absurdity. Of course actors require skills, but great acting usually defies such itemised explanation: we simply know that we have witnessed it; just as some actors and performers are blessed with that mysterious quality we call presence, which certainly gives them a head start.

I like a book jacket that tells you clearly, in words and images, what it is about. Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum does just that: ‘The authors’ central argument is that artists’ engagement with the museum has shifted from politically motivated critique taking place in museums of fine art, towards interventions taking place in non-art museums that focus on the creation of knowledge more broadly.’

And the image on the front, Gurrajin by Jonathan Jones, an installation from 2006 set in Elizabeth Bay House, illustrates this argument as well as any of the many examples reproduced inside. Honeycombed fluorescent lights cut white diamond shapes through the staid nineteenth-century interior with its pale green walls. It is like a duel between Dan Flavin and Ilya Kabakov for control of the same space. In fact, as the fifth section of the book, ‘Beautifying the Museum: the Aesthetics of Collections’ make clear, ‘The work honours the original occupants of this site by evoking their presence through flamboyant beauty.’ The inspiration comes from Aboriginal fisher-people and the double reflections set up by the small fires burning on board their vessels.

Like many, I have long been aware of the tendency, going back two or three decades, for artists to work within, reinterpret, and often challenge the works held in non-art museums, and the very spaces themselves. But this book astonished me by the sheer number of these projects, and it is a delight to see them all brought together. It is a global tendency, of course – Joseph Kosuth’s Passagen-Werk at documenta in 1992, where he veiled traditional statues with black cloth and white texts by Wittgenstein, Derrida, and Kafka is a prime example – but it is also impressively Australian, with some of our finest artists engaging in this hybrid practice. Thus we find Ross Gibson installing his work Life After Wartime (2003) in Sydney’s Justice and Police Museum. Botanic gardens across Australia have also been used as sites for creative interventions by many artists, but importantly by Janet Laurence and Peter Cripps. Writing about his project at The Museum of Economic Botany in Adelaide in 1993 (Project for Two Museums), Cripps said, ‘I was looking for a parallel stream. That’s what these museums are. They’re parallel to art museums but they aren’t that thing. So it was the possibility that I could do things in this context that I could never do within an art museum. I received incredible support from the Botanic Gardens – no resistance, the best experience I’ve ever had.’

When did you first write for ABR?

November 2000.

Which critics most impress you?

That’s a really hard question, for there are so many. I recently tried to write a list of critical works that I considered formative: it got very long very quickly. I think John Berger is near the top: I love his lucidity, his careful ethics, and his perceptive responsiveness.

Supporting Australian writers

In the May 2015 issue our Editor lamented the low or non-payment of many book reviewers (young ones especially). Peter Rose wrote: ‘The time has come for us all to become better literary citizens – more engaged, more informed, more giving. We’re all involved: publishers, consumers, and writers.’ He committed the magazine to doubling its base rate as soon as possible.

The response has been remarkable. Dozens and dozens of people, sharing our belief that literature is not an indulgence and that all writers deserve to be paid, have made donations (some of them substantial ones). We know from their comments that they too are concerned about the withholding of payment and professional encouragement from young writers. Close readers of our Patrons pages will note the addition of several new names and upward movement within the different tiers (from the resolute Realists to the audacious Augustans and Olympians). We thank all of our donors. Every $5 or $50 donation helps our cause and goes to critics and creative artists.

Because of readers’ generosity, ABR is now able to increase its base rate for reviewers from $40 to $45 per 100 words. It’s not a fortune but it’s heading in the right direction, and it certainly beats the $20 per 100 words we were able to pay as recently as early 2013. Poets now receive $300 per poem. Essays and short stories will also attract higher payments.

With your support, we intend to increase our base rates further in coming months – and beyond that. Our campaign continues, and it is a genuine and energetic one.

One caveat though: sustaining these base rates and increasing them in future years will require support from subscribers, government, philanthropic foundations, and donors. All four tiers are crucial – especially the first. The easiest way for individuals to assist magazines that support Australian writers and new talent is to subscribe to them.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowships

Any issue of this magazine that carries an ABR Fellowship article is a notable one for ABR. The Fellowship program – created in 2010 and inaugurated by Patrick Allington with a long investigative article on the contested history of the Miles Franklin Award (ABR, June 2011) – has reinvigorated the magazine. The Fellowships (each worth $5,000) are intended to reward outstanding Australian writers and to enhance ABR through the publication of major works of literary journalism.

This month we publish Shannon Burns’s Fellowship article – an 11,000-word profile of Gerald Murnane. If anyone can put Goroke on the map it is Shannon Burns – with a little help from his distinguished subject. Since moving to this small town in the Wimmera six years ago, the author of The Plains and Tamarisk Row has made it his own. He is secretary of the Anzac Day committee and a member of the Goroke Men’s Shed; he has even judged the local yabby competition. Nor has Murnane been idle in a literary sense. As well as maintaining his voluminous personal archive, he has written several new books. Text will soon publish Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf (Shannon Burns is reviewing it for us).

For admirers of Gerald Murnane’s oeuvre, ABR is presenting a related event in Adelaide on Monday, 3 August. Shannon Burns will be in discussion with Patrick Allington. This is a free public event, but reservations are This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

The event will commence at 5.30 pm at the South Australian Writers’ Centre, 187 Rundle Street.

Now our thoughts turn to the next ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, applications for which close on 1 September. This particular Fellowship is for a substantial non-fiction article with an indigenous focus. All published Australian writers are eligible to apply. Please visit our website for guidelines and for more information about ABR’s Fellowship program.

As ever, we thank our many Patrons who make possible this program – and so much more.

Porter Prize

Dear to the hearts of many poets and poetry lovers, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize honours the life and work of the inimitable Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010). It has also generated many thousands of new poems since the Prize was first offered in 2005, and has dispersed tens of thousands of dollars to poets (winners and those shortlisted). Here we thank Morag Fraser AM (past Chair of ABR and a close friend and colleague of Peter’s) for her magnificent support.

We now welcome entries for the twelfth Porter Prize. The total prize money is $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000. For the first time the overall winner will also receive an impression of Arthur Boyd’s print The lady and the unicorn (1975), created for the book of the same name, which the artist produced with Peter Porter (one of four celebrated collaborations of theirs in the 1970s and 1980s). This print is kindly donated by Ivan Durrant in honour of Georges Mora.

The poet–judges are Lisa Gorton (Poetry Editor of ABR), Luke Davies (a past winner of the Prime Minister’s Award for poetry), and Kate Middleton, who was shortlisted for the 2015 Porter Prize.

Like the Calibre and Jolley Prizes, the Porter is now open to anyone writing in English, irrespective of where they live. We are delighted that ninety per cent of competition entrants are now availing themselves of our online entry system (faster, cheaper, more efficient). We encourage poets to enter online. You have until 1 December to do so.

Jolley galore

Hats off to our three intrepid judges of this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize: Amy Baillieu, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Paddy O’Reilly. With the kind of dispatch and control that are features of the short form itself, they have reduced the overall field of more than 1,200 entries to a longlist of thirty-two stories. Next month the three shortlisted stories will be published in our Fiction issue. The authors will be named, but not so the winner until the Jolley Prize ceremony on Friday, 4 September, when the authors will introduce and read from their stories. ABR will have a strong presence at this year’s Brisbane Writers Festival; this is one of three ABR-related events on the program. It coincides with our first cultural tour, in partnership with Academy Travel (visit Academy Travel's website for full details).

Walking to Boyd

Melburnians will soon have a chance to hear 2015 Calibre Prize winner Sophie Cunningham in conversation with British satirist and novelist Will Self, author of Great Apes and Umbrella. Sophie Cunningham’s Calibre-winning essay (‘Staying with the Trouble’, ABR, May 2015) is a meditation on New York City, Alzheimer’s, climate change – and the subtle pleasures of pedestrianism.

‘The Politics and Pleasures of Walking’ is part of the Melbourne Writers Festival program. It will take place at Boyd (Assembly Hall) on Saturday, 29 August (2 pm). Tickets are on sale now. Be quick though: this event is likely to sell out quickly.

Kibble Awards

Congratulations to Joan London and Ellen van Neerven, the dual winners of the 2015 Kibble Awards. Joan London won the $30,000 Kibble Literary Award for established authors for her book The Golden Age, while Ellen van Neerven (our inaugural ‘Future Tense’ Q&A guest in the June–July issue) won the $5,000 Dobbie Literary Award for a first-time published author, for Heat and Light.

Miles high

This year the Miles Franklin Literary Award went to award-winning children’s fiction author Sofie Laguna for her second novel for adults, The Eye of the Sheep. She took out the $60,000 prize from a shortlist that included Sonya Hartnett, Joan London, Christine Piper, and Craig Sherborne. This month Sofie Laguna is our Open Page subject.

Poetry books as artefacts in their own right, regardless of commercial viability or relevance to the click-bait Zeitgeist, are currently showing sturdy signs of life, so it is a welcome development to have the online Cordite Review sensibility fixed in print, in a palpable way and on a graspable scale. These are fine-looking books: Zoë Sadokierski’s cover design template allows for each book to have a distinctive colour scheme and for the images within the design to reflect the verse within, in its particulars and its atmosphere.

Crankhandle ($20 pb, 56 pp, 9780994259608), continues Alan Loney’s long-standing interest in capturing fragmented or passing thoughts and utterances. It reasserts his belief that these are not fragmented in the sense of being unfinished or worn away, but because, as he says, ‘fragments are all we have, and will ever have. If some are very long and some very short, then that is simply how things are.’ This book is a succession, or assemblage, of these fragments, but not in such a way that they are in order, or stuck together at any point. There are Oulipo-esque chunks of dictionary-mining, reflections on the body, and on language, and the death and decay of each: ‘hands unable / the skill leaving him / his dream of beginning / dissolved / prospect of becoming a poet / broken / the printing press / cranking out / the crack’d word.’ It is, as Michael Farrell aptly says in his introduction, a book of ‘thinks’. Loney, with the calm concentration acquired from years as a letterpress printer, rolls them out without trying to disguise the constant whisper of the type, rearranging and redisposing itself beneath the paper at every turn of the crankhandle. The book has a kind of coda, a concentration of thought coming after the expanse of thinks, that extracts the world-weariness one senses beneath the carpet of thoughts, and asks ‘do I / merely copy words down, another / Bartleby, who’d prefer to do / nothing else with his time / with his body’. That is an unanswerable question – there is not even a question mark – but it will be interesting to see what Loney cranks out next.

Oliver Mol’s début memoir, Lion Attack!, began as an online series titled ‘34 Memories of Growing Up in Texas’. As he relates in the foreword, he wrote these pieces of ‘sudden memoir’ on consecutive days and then uploaded them straight to Facebook. It was only when the series was completed and collated that Mol thought he might have something. The series won Mol the inaugural Scribe Nonfiction Prize for Young Writers in 2013 and the opportunity to publish the old-fashioned way.

These vignettes are where Mol’s writing is at its best. They crackle with energy and convey the otherworldliness of an America seen through the eyes of an Australian child. They are slotted between a contemporaneous story that traces the path of a twenty-something Mol who is now living in Melbourne but still struggling to find himself. Mol is writing the book we are now reading; he works in a warehouse and pursues a romantic interest, Lisa, whom he met online. While they share a coming-of-age theme, the two narrative threads don’t quite come together.

The practice of the law is about stories. The stories the parties tell to the judge, the story the judge tells back or, if you like, the judge’s review of the parties’ stories. Along the way there can be much that is frankly boring to onlookers, or indeed the parties themselves, but also drama, pathos, and humour, both intentional and the opposite. And past cases can give us revealing glimpses into the social and historical context of the times.

Keith Mason, formerly President of the New South Wales Court of Appeal, has expertly mined the vast Pilbara of Australian legal stories to produce an entertaining and thought-provoking second volume of legal miscellany.

Some anecdotes are well worn, with multiple attributions, like the judge saying to counsel, ‘I am much the wiser for your submission’ and counsel riposting ‘Not wiser perhaps, but better informed’. Mason quotes Clive James’s observation that a clever remark may ‘float upwards until it attaches itself to someone sufficiently famous’.

Others have a spontaneous human charm, like the ‘wily old lady ducking and weaving in cross-examination’. Finally, exasperated counsel said: ‘Look Mrs X. It is a simple question. The answer must be yes or no.’ She smiled at him and said: ‘Yes or no.’