The subject line of the email ­– from a father in Budapest to his daughter in Oregon – is ‘Changes’. ‘I’ve got some interesting news for you,’ writes Steven. ‘I have decided that I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside.’ Thus Susan Faludi, an author known for her books on feminism and the collapse of traditional masculinity, learns that her father has undergone sex reassignment surgery in Thailand. At seventy-six, Steven has become Stefánie.

Ali Smith is a formally and thematically exuberant writer who takes obvious pleasure in the art of storytelling, the mutability of language, and slippages in representation and perception. Her novels are typically embedded in the contemporary world, and take account of social and technological developments, as well as political conflicts and crises. They also tend to give equal space to suffering and pleasure: the racking cough of the homeless woman in Hotel World (2001) is as memorable as the ‘woooooooo-hooooooo’ of its tumbling ghost.

Three years ago, Australia was supposedly being overrun by asylum seekers arriving by boat. The situation was considered grave and dominated public debate and the government’s agenda for months. An alternative government was elected on the promise to ‘stop the boats’. In 2015, Europe was said to be in the grip of a refugee crisis. ‘We are witnessing a paradigm change,’ said the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, in June 2015, ‘an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before.’

The scale of human displacement is mind-boggling. At the last count, more than sixty-five million people worldwide have been forced from their homes. About a third of them have been classified as refugees. But the size of displacement, in either absolute or relative terms, is not unprecedented. And while in recent years countries such as Lebanon and Jordan have indeed experienced a refugee crisis, the European Union, with a total population of half a billion people, ought to have been easily able to cope with the arrival of a million asylum seekers in one year.

Australia’s presumed predicament also ought to be put into perspective: the total number of asylum seekers and refugees who arrived in 2013 either by boat or through the country’s humanitarian program was less than half of that of refugees resettled in 1949, when Australia’s population was a third of the size of today’s.

In The Bush (2014), Don Watson explored notions of what that most variegated of terms, ‘the bush’, meant to earlier generations, including his own family. In A Single Tree, he presents extracts from writings of all kinds for what he calls ‘a fragmentary history of humans in the Australian bush’. He takes as given the diverse applications of the word ‘bush’ over time and chooses pieces that give expression to a multiplicity of feelings, words, and thoughts around aspects of Australian place.

The urge to assign meaning to the natural world beneath our feet or in the distance is abiding and universal, and the work has been pursued on Terra Australis as elsewhere on the planet. For Australia’s British conquerors in the nineteenth century, the job was never going to be easy. Before any possibility of harnessing the continent to their various needs, a first difficulty lay in simply comprehending what it was they were seeing, so different was the scene to back home.

Describing Mexico City without tripping over a cliché is not easy. Vibrant, colourful, dangerous, loud, exhilarating, rich in history and gastronomic delights, it’s all been said before. But one aspect of Mexico that is not often spoken about is its correspondences with Australia. Famously, the pre-Columbian ruins of Monte Albán and Chichén Itzá influenced architect Jørn Utzon’s design of the Sydney Opera House’s podium and Monumental Steps. Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet (1996) was filmed in Mexico City. There is also a little-known anecdote about colonial palaces that links Mexico to Australia, via none other than Victoria’s first lieutenant governor, Charles La Trobe.

What is now known as the ‘Historic Centre’ of Mexico City, an area of about ten square kilometres that includes thousands of heritage buildings, monuments, museums, archaeological sites, and government offices, was once Tenochtitlán, the centre of the Aztec Empire. Erected where five sacred lakes meet, with its mighty avenues, gardens, canals, and great temples – including Montezuma’s personal palace, famous for its zoos and aquariums, and for having more than one hundred rooms, each with running water for the monarch’s guests – Tenochtitlán, according to the writings of Hernán Cortés and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, was a sight to behold.

If a collection of stories is put together on the basis that these are the ‘best Australian stories of 2016’, is it fair or reasonable to hope for some kind of cohesiveness or gestalt beyond those three explicit parameters of quality, place, and time? The answer will depend largely on what the editor’s ideas might be, not only about what makes a good short story, but also about the way to make a group of individual stories add up to a book: to something more than the sum of its parts.

This year’s editor, Charlotte Wood, herself a celebrated writer of fiction, is a woman of unusual intellectual flexibility and reach: at one end of the spectrum she is quickly gaining an international reputation for her dreamlike dystopian novel The Natural Way of Things (2015), at once a powerful political fable and an extraordinary feat of imagination; and at the other end she has experience as a senior arts administrator and a scholar, this year adding a PhD to her growing collection of achievements.

Katherine Mansfield is one of those shimmering literary figures whose life looms larger than her work. This is not because her writing lacks value: Mansfield’s spiky and diffuse tales, published in the first decades of the twentieth century, helped reshape our ideas of what short stories are and what they can do. But her life story proved to be even more compelling. As American essayist Patricia Hampl points out, Mansfield was an early example of the ‘lost woman writer’, her generation’s Sylvia Plath. Though Mansfield – unlike the American poet – did not court death, doing her best to outrun the tuberculosis that finally killed her in 1923 at the age of thirty-four, it was her early demise that elevated her to minor cult status.

Mansfield’s husband, John Middleton Murry, was the first and most impressively indefatigable of the myth-makers. In the five years following her death, he whipped out strategically massaged editions of her journals and letters, and by 1933 had produced a biography, in collaboration with a young Mansfield enthusiast, Ruth Elvish Mantz. It set out his partial and sentimental view of Mansfield’s early life. For the next twenty years, he would continue to promote, and profit from, his wife’s writings – ‘boiling Katherine’s bones to make his soup’, in the oft-quoted words of one of his contemporaries.

When times were difficult, Cynthia Reed Nolan ‘drew the veil’. Born in Evandale in 1908, the youngest of six children, Cynthia always sought distance. From an early age, like siblings Margaret and John, she longed to escape from Tasmania. Oddly, however, this was not what John Reed expected of her. Such anomalies make this biography, which foregrounds her life before she became Cynthia Nolan, particularly interesting. Drawing on newly available correspondence, it portrays a sensitive, ironic woman previously overshadowed by more famous contemporaries.

Cynthia believed that education happened outside school. While she was still at the Hermitage, sister school to Geelong Grammar School, her ability to use her family connections surfaced; she also began writing. Following her mother’s death, she spent more time on the mainland, where she met conductor Bernard Heinze, with whom she had an affair, experiencing ‘the utmost happiness, the utmost hell’. During this period, she laid the foundations of many lifelong friendships, but the urge for further independence and travel were irresistible. Her letters home portray her delight in freedom and her ability to find interesting places to stay. ‘Germans appear to be crazy for anything new and it is the fashion to have an English girl [sic] in your house ... I’m really made a fuss of which is naturally too gratifying.’ She spent six months in the Mullers’ household in Königsberg. But conditions in Europe were deteriorating and she reluctantly headed home, aged twenty-one.

In ‘The Art of Biography’, Virginia Woolf insists that this ‘is the most restricted of all the arts’ and that even if many biographies are written, few survive. But somehow, by sifting and compressing and silhouetting, her friend Lytton Strachey – ‘alive and on tiptoe’ amid new ideas of biographical realism – managed to unshackle this truth-bound genre. Ever since Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (1918) eschewed dead biographical matter and cut to the chase, life writers have swung past the doldrums of inauspicious facts and aimed for something more brisk. This is how Frederic Spotts introduces us to his subject, Klaus Mann – briskly. He was ‘six times jinxed. A son of Thomas Mann. A homeless exile. A drug addict. A writer unable to publish in his native tongue. A not-so-gay gay. Someone haunted all his life by a fascination with death.’ (Spotts is simply doubling the curses already listed by the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki in his book on the Manns).

Born in Munich in 1906, the second of Katia and Thomas Mann’s six children, Klaus became a famous but – according to the thesis of this new biography – an insufficiently loved German-American writer. He led a troublesome life. He was a journalist, critic, playwright, essayist, and novelist. Der fromme Tanz (1926) is recognised as Germany’s first modern novel with a manifestly gay theme. He is best known for Mephisto (1936), which was banned by Hitler’s regime and nervously shoved aside in the postwar years, then briefly published in West Germany in the early 1960s and promptly banned again. The reason for this dicey history is its blistering portrait of Mann’s former friend and ex-brother-in-law Gustav Gründgens, the turncoat actor and director who was fêted during and after the Third Reich. The ban on Mephisto was effective until 1981, when it became a bestseller and an award-winning film. It had arrived almost half a century after conception. Klaus’s personal favourite, Der Vulkan (1939), and the autobiographical The Turning Point (1942) underscore his passionate fight against fascism. Like his uncle Heinrich Mann, he was at once a writer and an activist.

Tissues on the sofa

Dear Editor,
I’m pleased that Peter Craven found so much to enjoy in The Boy behind the Curtain (ABR, December 2016). Winton always writes good – though somewhat deliberate, even mannered – prose. But in my view his work has become a kind of sacred cow in this country: no one seems willing to write a critical review of it. Craven’s is a case in point, fawning to a fault.

There are some good things about the book, as your reviewer says; but there are problematic areas, too, and Craven is reluctant to identify them. This is a memoir: you expect it to be personal. But it is far too emotionally indulgent. Winton, in this book and in others, wallows. Even his political commitments rarely go beyond his own outrage and sadness. Emotional intelligence is valuable, and Winton has that, but it needs to be connected to other kinds of intelligence and to seek deeply informed insight beyond the borders of the author’s personal feelings – with which Winton is obsessed. He avoids the complexities of contemporary Aboriginal issues, and seems to have made even less effort to educate himself about them. The same is true of environmental issues. It’s a pity he didn’t take more seriously the work of Peter Matthiessen, who really did write in this integrated, informed way. Here it is all navigated from inside the Winton universe of feeling. It’s all very comfortable, but in the end it requires little engagement from the reader beyond tissues on the sofa.

Is this why Australian readers love Tim Winton? Perhaps we don’t do well, as a people, when we have to think and question and learn.

Geoffrey Wells (online comment)

Russian accents

Dear Editor,
Andrew Fuhrmann is mistaken when he says ‘the much lauded 2011 Sydney Theatre Company production of Uncle Vanya with Cate Blanchett was done with Russian accents’ (Arts Update, November 2016). I know this to be quite untrue because I was in it. At the insistence of the Hungarian director Tamás Ascher, we actors used various Australian accents, depending on our characters’ station in life, ranging from broad and rustic, to middlebrow and educated, to downright posh, rather like a typical cross-section of accents one can hear any day in Australia. What’s more, American audiences seem to have no problem listening to an Australian accent; some even profess to enjoy it.

Jacki Weaver (online comment)

Freaks and oddballs

Dear Editor,
That’s rather naughty of Red Stitch to change words in a translation they are using. Did they obtain written permission from the translator’s agent to do this? I doubt it. Many Australian theatre companies are not abiding by the rules and contracts that are clearly stipulated by playwrights and translators alike: that is, not to change a word in the script. If Red Stitch didn’t get permission to change ‘freaks’ to ‘oddballs’, the company should be ashamed of itself. After all, Annie Baker is the translator, not Nadia Tass (or anyone else).

Eleanor Windsor (online comment)

Marta Kaczmarek and David Whiteley in Red Stitch Theatre Company's Uncle Vanya (photograph by David Parker)

Andrew Fuhrmann replies:

Many thanks to Jacki Weaver for correcting the not-so-small matter of the accents used in the STC’s production of Uncle Vanya during their tour of the United States. Alas, I can no longer remember where I picked up this (in hindsight) absurd misconception. I’m pleased to be corrected by such an incontrovertible authority, but vexed that I didn’t check it myself.

Regarding the translation: for what it’s worth, I do think that ‘oddball’ worked well enough in this production. It’s a colloquial Americanism, so it fits in with the rest of the translation. There’s a discussion of the relative merits of ‘creep’ and ‘oddball’ on page seven of the program of the Round House Theatre’s 2015 production.

There is a well-meaning musician who performs intermittently in Central Australia. When he plays his hit song, he tries to augment the lyrics by chanting the word ‘strong’ in local language. In fact, he is singing a similar word that means urine. Presumably he thinks the audience’s laughter connotes delight rather than derision.

Benign intentions, botched communication, a messy outcome. Interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians have been ever thus. Inga Clendinnen’s Dancing with Strangers (2003) made the case that the British incursion at Sydney Cove involved goodwill from pivotal figures on both sides, undermined by mutual misunderstanding. And, of course, the small matter of taking land.

Twenty years ago, in a research paper on the so-called ‘history wars’, Mark McKenna wrote, ‘The most terrible events in the past can be used as a source of positive affirmation if they are addressed in an honest and open manner. All history is useful.’ In From the Edge, McKenna limns the liminality of European settlement in a country that had been occupied for millennia. By exploring of four stories from very different parts of the continent, he derives some truths that are widely applicable.

At the launch of Up Came a Squatter, Geoffrey Blainey reflected on how important the wool industry was to Australia for more than a hundred years. He noted that forty or fifty years ago you would not have bothered to mention the fact: it was as understood as the vagaries of Melbourne’s weather. Now wool is not even among Australia’s twenty top exports. Many of those present listening to Blainey and the author speak were from the Western District, descendants of Niel Black and others who established squatting runs in the 1830s and 1840s on the lands of Australia Felix ‘discovered’ by Major Mitchell during his overland expedition of 1836. An inevitable result of the land’s rapid occupation by squatters was the dispossession and near destruction of the local indigenous peoples.

Niel Black was a Scot from Argyll shire with extensive farming experience. He came to Australia in 1839 having formed Niel Black & Co with his own capital and that of two Scottish partners, one a first cousin of the future statesman William Ewart Gladstone. Black developed their land holdings on two core principles. He would not borrow money but only use the partners’ capital, and he would not break the sixth commandment. He deplored the boasting of some of his fellow squatters about how they had killed Aborigines on their runs who had stolen sheep or speared a shepherd. To overcome his moral dilemma, he made a conscious decision to buy an established run where the Aboriginal ‘problem’ had been solved by others before him.

‘The devil! It’s a woman!’ exclaimed a charwoman as she laid out the naked body of James Barry, MD, for burial. Seventy-six years earlier, Barry had been born Margaret Bulkley in a struggling Irish merchant family. After taking her uncle’s name and expending his estate on medical school, Margaret acted the part of a man for six decades.

The life she enjoyed as a man was breathtaking. She surmounted the early challenges of switching genders: she assumed a masculine voice and bearing, and falsified her age to account for her smooth skin and diminutive stature. James Barry became an army surgeon and worked tirelessly in a string of colonies, healing illness, improving sanitation, and educating civilians and military personnel in healthful living. It was a successful but unremarkable career: a breathtaking life for a woman of her time.

After he crossed the Rubicon, Julius Caesar marched on Rome and imposed an authoritarian rule that would alter history. The way in which Australia embraced Malcolm Turnbull’s overthrow of Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2015 suggests that some may have harboured similar hopes, on a slightly less grand scale, for the twenty-ninth prime minister. On the first anniversary of the coup, Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen, public intellectuals and professors of politics both, have released a book titled The Turnbull Gamble in which they gauge what emulating the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd débâcle rendered unto the Liberal Party.

Instead of Caesar, Errington and van Onselen trace a parallel between Turnbull, wandering amid the ‘wreckage’ of the July 2016 federal election, and another aggressor against Rome: King Pyrrhus of Epirus. Like Pyrrhus against the Romans, Turnbull’s electoral victory over Labor was so costly as to invite defeat. The Turnbull Gamble analyses the two ‘political gambles’ that led to this impasse; first, the decision by a majority of the Liberal Party to make Turnbull prime minister; second, the new regime’s gambit to inflict a mid-year, ten-week double dissolution election on the nation. Turnbull as leader and the election he risked are, inexplicably, treated separately, bifurcating the first and second halves of the book into two related yet disunited theses.

Extinctions takes its time giving up its secrets, and there are some we will never know. One of its most persistent enigmas is what kind of book it is. I wondered, during the first half, whether it was a powerful and perceptive example of the Bildungsroman for seniors: an elderly person (usually male) meets someone new who teaches him to be a better person, to pay attention to the important things in life, to treat those he loves properly, to reconcile himself to his past – in short, to grow up.

Mictlán, the underworld of Aztec mythology, is divided into nine regions, like Dante’s Inferno. Yuri Herrera’s novella, Signs Preceding the End of the World, opens with a symbolic doorway to that underworld: a sinkhole that swallows a man, a dog, and a couple of cars parked down the street, missing Mika, the protagonist, by a few steps.

Signs Preceding the End of the World is one of two novellas in this volume. Herrera belongs to a group of Mexican authors whose translated works are making headlines internationally (Valeria Luiselli, Álvaro Enrigue, Juan Villoro). To date he has published two children’s books, and three novellas. His first novella Trabajos del reino (to be published next year in translation as Kingdom Cons) tells the story of a talented singer and songwriter who falls under the dangerous patronage of a drug lord. Kingdom Cons received critical acclaim as an early example of what is now known in Mexico as ‘narcoliterature’, a subgenre that deals with the social and political issues that the drug wars have unleashed. The novella takes place in a border town, but the reader is never told exactly where. The text gravitates around the life and tribulations of a drug lord, but again, words that one would normally associate with such a setting are not present in the text.

If Peter Boyle’s new and selected, Towns in the Great Desert (which I reviewed in ABR, March 2014), was a tour de force of the imagination, and a book of stunningly strange and brilliant poetry, this next book, Ghostspeaking, surpasses it in ambition and virtuosity. Across nearly 400 pages, Boyle introduces us to eleven Spanish-speaking poets from Argentina, France, Spain, Cuba, Canada, and Puerto Rico, with small biographical portraits, reports of interviews, and translations of selections of their poems and memoirs. Often the work he translates is unpublished or only available in rare editions.

And what is translating if it is not ghost-speaking? The ghost-speaking in this anthology extends beyond the usual work of a translator, however, for each of these poets has been invented by Peter Boyle, and all of their various poems, styles, and autobiographical writings have been created by him in a Borgesian or Pessoan trickster world where, ‘when a true witch throws the yarrow-stalks of the dream, the sleeper will travel immense distances and wake convinced the myriad chances of life form a single path’ (from the writing of Elena Navronskaya Blanco, 1929–2014 [as ‘translated’ by Peter Boyle], a woman who refused to be interviewed, for, she wrote via her publisher, in Spanish, ‘I am neither an actress nor a politician and, accordingly, detest biographies’).

In the midst of preparing for an important London exhibition, photographer Andrew is drawn back to Australia by the sudden disappearance of his former girlfriend, Kirsten. His compulsion to resolve this troubled relationship evolves into a desire to account for an earlier loss. As Andrew grapples with his ambivalence about a new photographic subject, and his ability to sustain the ‘small, bright miracle’ of his present-day relationship with Dominique in Berlin, the complex role of photography in his life is redefined.

For the most part, the burgeoning 1980s nostalgia industry in Australia tends to overlook the fact that back then the states seemed to be engaged in a kind of Sheffield Shield of venality, competing to see which would prevail as the most politically debauched. One might have thought of the Queensland of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and Terry Lewis and the New South Wales of Abe Saffron and Roger Rogerson as topping the table, but Western Australia, like its cricket team of the period, was definitely no slouch.

The Birdman’s Wife is about passion, obsession, and ambition. Narrated by Elizabeth (Eliza) Gould, the novel relates her marriage to, and creative partnership with, zoologist John Gould. Opening with their meeting at the Zoological Society of London in 1828, Eliza’s narrative charts the years of her collaboration with Gould – including the time spent in the Australian colonies classifying and illustrating the native birdlife – as a result of which she came to be celebrated ‘not just [as] a wife and mother’, but as a zoological illustrator in her own right.

E.B. White once said there were three New Yorks, comprised of those who were born there (‘solidity and continuity’), the daily commuter (‘tidal restlessness’), and the searcher on a quest, the latter giving the city its passion and dedication to the arts. In The Museum of Modern Love, this third type is drawn to Marina Abramovíc’s The Artist is Present, a simple yet profound performance stretching over seventy-five unrelenting days, in which Marina unflinchingly meets the gaze of a series of individuals in a gallery.

Der Ring des Nibelungen, presented by Opera Australia three years after its première in Melbourne, was a great success, mostly because of the excellence of the singing. Several local singers retained their principal roles, but we had a new Siegmund, Wotan, Loge, Sieglinde, and Brünnhilde, all but the first from overseas. How refreshing to attend a Ring without a single dud individual performance. Four of the main roles – Brünnhilde, Sieglinde, Alberich, Siegfried – were sung about as well as we mortals have a right to expect. Let us hope that Opera Australia – with support from government and patrons – is able to mount a new Ring in the future. Clearly, there is a committed Wagner audience in Melbourne. Rarely has Arts Update been part of such a silent, respectful, avid, and ultimately demonstrative Ring audience. Economists and governments should exult, not just Wagnerites.

Although minor changes were introduced, Neil Armfield’s original production was largely unaltered. Clearly, the singers – many of them engaged and compelling actors – had responded to his close direction. Overall, however, the flaws in Armfield’s production were still manifest, as was the absence of any overarching or identifiable concept. The first and last operas were marred by the pointless introduction and hapless manipulation of otiose supernumeraries. Other effects were jarring. The Ride of the Valkyries resembled a public service drill, and the puny barbecue that encircled Brünnhilde was risible. The Immolation scene was spoiled by a pitch invasion.

In November 2016, former principal dancer Pavel Dmitrichenko entered the Bolshoi Ballet studios in Moscow to begin retraining for the stage. He had recently been released from prison for instigating an attack on his artistic director, Sergey Filin, in January 2013. Dmitrichenko’s plan went awry when his henchman, Yuri Zarutsky, decided to throw battery acid in Filin’s face, virtually blinding him. This act horrified the international ballet world and the public, and shed a new light on this famous but often troubled institution. After many operations, Filin recovered his sight in one eye, but lost his directorship. He now runs a choreographic workshop at the Bolshoi.

The irony that Dmitrichenko excelled as the murderous tsar in Ivan the Terrible is not lost on American musicologist Simon Morrison in Bolshoi Confidential: Secrets of the Russian ballet from the rule of the tsars to today (coincidentally released in November). Morrison sees Dmitrichenko and Zarutsky’s crimes not as rarities, but consistent with the rivalries, politics, and vexatious bureaucracies that have riven the Bolshoi Theatre since Catherine the Great fostered ballet in Moscow in 1806.

Finding the right teacher is always a challenge for young singers, and the relationship between student and teacher can see the formation of a lifelong bond. By the same token, when there is a falling-out there may be a legacy of hurt or bitterness. Mathilde Marchesi, the subject of Divas, was in her eighties, with more than fifty years of teaching behind her, when the New Zealand born Frances Alda first approached her. ‘What a czarina she was!’ Alda recalls in her wittily titled memoir Men, Women and Tenors (1937) – ‘upright and stiff as a ramrod, with snapping black eyes and stern, tightly compressed mouth’. Marchesi saw Alda’s potential and guided her into a stellar career. Marchesi became a legend in her own lifetime, attracting aspiring singers not only from Europe but from America and Australasia. One of her most famous students was Nellie Mitchell, whom she transformed into the phenomenon known as Melba.

Marchesi came from a well-to-do Frankfurt family, and from an early age was passionately devoted to music, but her father lost his fortune when she was sixteen and she was packed off to two aunts in Vienna with a view to her finding employment as a governess there. With some financial help from her sister, Mathilde avoided this fate and, overcoming opposition from her family, moved to Paris to study with Manuel García, a teacher in the bel canto tradition. Mathilde would appear to have been a mezzo soprano, but her relatively brief career was mostly confined to concert work, including a spell in London where she sang contralto parts in some of Handel’s popular oratorios. In 1852 she married the Italian baritone Salvatore Marchesi, who decided that it was not appropriate for his wife to appear on the operatic stage. It is not clear whether this veto came as a surprise to her, but she seemed to accept her fate gracefully, directing her energies into teaching.

There is a kind of dread in the heart of any reader who approaches a philosopher in the act of pronouncing on a great work of art. Many a filmmaker’s oeuvre and painter’s catalogue have been bullied to death by the schematics and architectures of these men – they are inevitably men – who attempt to explain an artist’s meaning in the context of a particular philosophy, be it political, moral, or aesthetic. They always reveal far more of themselves than the artist they are in the process of skewering, and the result is often reductive and parasitic.

Of course, it depends on the philosopher – and the artist. Roger Scruton is a formidable example of the former, and Richard Wagner a towering example of the latter; together, they make for fascinating, if occasionally uncomfortable, reading on the subject of the German composer’s monumental achievement, Der Ring des Nibelungen, which was recently performed in Melbourne (see page 39). There is a compelling tussle at the centre of this book, brought on by the author’s sometimes problematic but always deeply sensitive attempts to grapple with the sheer weight of the opera cycle, and the work’s fiendish ability to shirk any definitive interpretative analysis. Wagner wins, but the battle is worth following.

The spectrum of opinion on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder – ADHD in the acronym-crazed world of psychiatry – runs from the firiest red to the deepest purple. At the radical red extreme, critics see the diagnosis as a dangerous fiction, scripted by Big Pharma so that rambunctious youth can be profitably pacified. At the violet end, advocates view the condition as a disorder of the brain, its validity attested to by mountains of genetic and neuroscientific evidence and its treatment necessarily biomedical. Parents of affected children tend to lean in this direction, pulled by some combination of medical authority, relief from the moralistic judgement that wild children must have deficient care-givers, and the appeal of a pharmacological solution to their troubles.

Alan Schwarz is no scarlet radical, but his book on the history and politics of ADHD glows like a slow-burning ember. Schwarz acknowledges the reality of pathological inattention and hyperactivity, and does not deny that the condition has a neurobiological dimension. His critique does not undermine the essential idea of ADHD so much as the way it has been stretched, marketed, and leveraged by commercial interests, with the willing connivance of mental health professionals. Without dismissing the value of medication in the treatment of ADHD, Schwarz is refreshingly scathing in his assessment of some of the main pharmaceutical players and their medical mouthpieces.

If there is a single event that marks the maturity of a new field of study, it may well be the appearance of a sprawling monograph from a trade publisher. Empire of Things: How we became a world of consumers, from the fifteenth century to the twenty-first by Frank Trentmann, Professor of History at Birkbeck University College of London, announces the arrival of consumption history in lavish style. Consumption, defined as ‘the acquisition, flow and use of things’, is a defining feature of twenty-first century life. That much we can all agree on. Beyond this, certain obdurate myths obtain, against which the history of consumption sets itself.

The most familiar of these is a definition of consumption as ‘private choice, rampant individualism and market exchange’, emerging after World War II in the West (particularly in the United States) and spreading out from there. On closer inspection, however, the roots of modern consumption reach back to at least the fifteenth century. This history has often been told from the perspective of production, but to approach this lengthy historical span from the perspective of consumption is to experience a paradigm shift. Technological change and the forces of production are not the only drivers of economic and social development; consumption, along with the forces that alternately encourage and constrain it, is just as important.

The seventeenth century was unquestionably one of the most tumultuous and transformative periods of European history. It was a century that saw Europe ravaged by war and religious conflict, the reimagining of a new political order, the break from the medieval scholastic worldview, and the birth of modern science. In his latest book, A.C. Grayling mounts a case for considering the seventeenth century as the most significant epoch in human history. In this retelling of the Enlightenment grand narrative, Grayling traces the dramatic changes that took place in politics, religion, philosophy, science, technology, letter-writing, and even literary style over the course of the seventeenth century, in an effort to locate the origins of ‘the modern mind’.

Grayling’s central thesis is that the political and religious turmoil of the seventeenth century created the conditions under which traditional forms of authority gradually lost their hold, thus opening the way for the emergence of the modern scientific worldview. This was an intellectual revolution forged amidst the devastation of the Thirty Years War, a renewed fascination with magic and the occult, and the quest for a new philosophical method. Here, Grayling provides a fascinating insight into the way in which changing social and political conditions contributed to the rise of early modern European scientific culture. The short chapter on the new developments of the European postal service provides a particularly striking example of how the rapidly changing social and technological context was instrumental in the spread of new ideas and the formation of the first scientific societies.

The recent scandal over Facebook’s censorship of Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of ‘Napalm girl’, Kim Phuc, offers a salutary reminder of photography’s stubborn resistance to narrative orthodoxy or societal norms. The editors at Facebook were hardly the first to fret over the propriety of reproducing the photo. When Ut first brought his film into the Associated Press’s Saigon office, the duty photo editor rejected the pictures of Phuc: AP’s policy was clear – no frontal nudity. Recognising the significance of the image, Horst Faas ensured that it was printed and dispatched – but only after a photo-tech lightened the child’s pubis to make clear that she was pre-pubescent. Societal norms be damned. Despite the dedicated revisionism surrounding the photo, on full display again during the recent spat, it did not change the course of the war. By 1972, President Richard Nixon’s Vietnamisation policies were in full force and the Americans had fewer than 70,000 troops in the country. The photo revealed that the training and equipping of South Vietnamese forces had scarcely improved their efficiency: Kim Phuc was the victim of a misdirected South Vietnamese napalm attack, the day after the same air force had killed nine of its own troops near Hue. This undermined Nixon’s repeated assertions that the war, and the defence of democracy, were safe with Vietnamese forces. Their carelessness and incompetence were writ large all over Kim Phuc’s burned body.

It goes without saying that no equivalent photo, neither so graphic, nor so contradictory of the official narrative, has emerged from any of Australia’s military engagements. The Australian military has rigorously controlled the access of photographers – and reporters – to its conflict zones. Their work has been subject to multiple layers of vetting ensuring that the images that emerge faithfully support the official line on the given conflict. There have been no Vietnams for the Australian military – least of all in Vietnam!

What was your pathway to publishing?

In 1979, when I was twenty, I took Vincent Buckley’s poetry seminar at Melbourne University. He introduced us to the work of the Northumbrian poet Basil Bunting, by then in his late seventies. That summer I went to Britain in pursuit of Bunting. In Newcastle I knocked on the door of Bloodaxe Books and explained my mission to Neil Astley, the publisher. It was the first publishing office I had ever been in. I thought: this is what I am going to do. Neil phoned Bunting and I caught a bus to the council estate where he lived. We talked until the light faded. My future had found me. After I came back to Melbourne, I set up Scripsi with Peter Craven.

Name the first book you published.

The casual visitor to Oslo, with little or no knowledge of Norway’s recent history, could be forgiven for being unaware that per capita this is one of the wealthiest nations in the world. With its predominantly nineteenth-century streetscapes and the absence of large or monumental buildings, there is in fact little evidence, except for the recently built opera house on the harbour, that Oslo is the capital of a nation with the world’s largest future fund. The latter, with assets worth 185 per cent of the country’s GDP, was built on rates of taxes on petroleum resources, that in some instances, were as high as eighty-five per cent. The Norwegians have managed to avoid the euphoria that often accompanies mineral riches and resource booms, and have invested their petroleum riches so as to become one of the world’s biggest creditors.

This, then, is the puzzle that is Norway. A seafaring nation with poor soils but a great deal of mineral wealth has been able to create a sovereign wealth fund that is their ‘trillion dollar baby’. How was Norway able to extract so much in economic rent from multinational oil companies?

Paul Cleary’s interest in Norway’s success is motivated by his experiences with the current Australian minerals boom. An Australian journalist who worked in East Timor and has written on the oil industry in the Timor Gap, Cleary was astonished to discover the control the Norwegian state had over the development of mineral resources. This book is the outcome of that astonishment. As he notes in the afterword, his goal was to understand why Norway was able to amass a Future Fund worth US$760 billion, while Australia, after the biggest and longest minerals boom since the 1850s gold rush, finds itself more than $1 trillion in debt. At the heart of the book are fundamental questions of public policy.

Siri Hustvedt revels in ambiguity, the in-between places where the certainties of fact fray. In her idea-driven novels such as The Enchantment of Lily Dahl (1996), What I Loved (2003), and The Summer Without Men (2011), gender is often fluid, identity unfixed, relationships precarious. Her own neurological condition that causes seizure-like flailing, which she chronicles in The Shaking Woman (2010), defies categorisation or treatment, and seems to exist in a mysterious realm between the mental and physical. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women, her fifth collection of essays, builds bridges between the humanities and the sciences, while she challenges the convictions of both. Throughout Hustvedt’s compulsive and demanding work, she refuses to accept staid understandings. She writes, ‘I discover what I think because I write. The act of writing is not a translation of thought into words, but rather a process of discovery.’

In the book’s 550-plus pages, we enter a conversation with a thinker working through questions about how we experience and remember art, the nuances of neurological disorders, and where writers get their ideas. She couples these explorations with personal anecdotes and discordant sources. Divided into three parts, the essays – on such topics as the mind–body problem, Pina Bausch’s choreography, Susan Sontag’s take on pornography, and how trauma can induce physical disability – are a result of reflection on visual arts for exhibition catalogues; her own work for a scholarly collection that examines ambiguity in her oeuvre; suicide prevention for a conference in Oslo; a keynote on Kierkegaard for the philosopher’s two-hundredth birthday; and her time as a writing teacher in a psychiatric hospital. She refuses to stay within the fiction writer’s traditional safe places. ‘The truth,’ she writes, ‘is I am filled to the brim with the not always harmonious voices of other writers.’

Catherine de Saint Phalle’s memoir brings us the developing consciousness of a star-struck but lonely child as she struggles to understand and negotiate parents who appear to her mythic, godlike. There is her Spanish-born mother, Marie-Antoinette or Poum, whose main occupation seems to be reeling off The Odyssey and whose sudden appearances and disappearances are ‘like the goddess Minerva’s’, and her father, Alexandre, who sweeps Catherine along on glamorous excursions and regales her with stories – here Napoleon or Caesar, there his childhood dog, Touts – before unceremoniously disappearing for days on end. Catherine is captivated as much by Poum’s whimsical moods, fears, and obsession with death as by Alexandre’s grandiose tales, but as parents they scarcely appear to see her as a child who needs their care.

This book is likely to anger many readers. Saltwater is about Cathy McLennan’s time as a barrister for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Legal Service on Palm Island and in Townsville in the 1990s. Aged twenty-two and faced with a heavy workload, she was confronted with heartbreaking cases of violence, trauma, and neglect. Other lawyers in the office came and went, but the Aboriginal field officers remained constant. Throughout, there are reminders that Palm Island is a beautiful place with forests and crystalline water, despite its being referred to as ‘the most violent place on earth outside a war zone’.

McLennan focuses on the murder of a white man named Peter Lewis that occurred on Palm Island. She introduces the reader to the four young Indigenous people accused of the crime: Albert, eighteen, possibly brain-damaged; Dillon, seventeen; Malachi, sixteen, described as having a ‘snake-eye look’; and the youngest boy, Kevie, thirteen. The mother of Malachi and aunt of Dillon is Tanya Butler, a tragic figure violently abused and assaulted by her white husband, who also abused his three sons from the time they were babies. He is in prison for domestic violence. We follow their fates over the course of the book, and learn how difficult Tanya’s life is, holding on to the hope that her youngest son won’t go the way of his two brothers.

For more than half a century, Richie Benaud (1930–2015) graced the game of cricket around the world. A dashing batsman and fierce leg-spinner, Benaud was the first player to score 2,000 runs and take 200 wickets in Test cricket. As Australian captain, he never lost a series and championed an attractive, attacking brand of cricket. As a television commentator for Channel Nine in Australia and Channel Four in England, Benaud became the gold standard for insight, economy, and dry wit. Throughout a long career, he was stylish, charming, and profoundly influential.

In Benaud: An appreciation, Brian Matthews – an award-winning writer and literary scholar – eschews conventional biography and embarks on a trickier endeavour: a celebration. The book is composed of a series of cameos – key moments in Benaud’s career – intermingled with the author’s personal reflections and with extensive quotations from cricketers and journalists. The result is a pleasant, if idiosyncratic, book that is perhaps best enjoyed on a summer afternoon, or a few chapters at a time during lunch or tea breaks.

One of the highlights of the book is Matthews’s account of the Tied Test between Australia and the West Indies in 1960. In the lead-up to this series, Test cricket was in trouble. Attendances had dwindled as a result of stodgy batting, slow over rates, and negative captaincy.

Why do you write?

To work out what I think, which requires digging through the received ideas and lazy generalisations that clutter the surface of my mind, and crafting the language to describe what I’ve found. I also have a strong desire to communicate certain things.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes, I have vivid dreams full of ridiculously obvious symbolism.

Where are you happiest?

In my studio.

What is your favourite film?

There’s no single film I could claim as favourite – among the films I’ve loved are The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost in Translation, Beetlejuice, Birdman, Blue Velvet, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Apocalypse Now, Doctor Strangelove, and All About Eve.

A book called Our Lady of the Fence Post (UWA Publishing, $22.99 pb, 105 pp, 9781742589121) by a poet called J.H. Crone is an irresistible proposition, simply as a notion. Luckily for readers, neither is at all fanciful. This verse narrative explores the events around the appearance in 2003 of a likeness of the Virgin Mary on a fence post at Coogee, near the site of a memorial for five local rugby players killed in the Bali bombings. Crowds of fervent worshippers flocked to the scene.

The elements of the real story are fantastical enough without any poetic embellishment: faith, anti-faith, nationalism, sensationalism, online abuse, grief whirled through the media at the time, all largely forgotten now. This heady mix, fading into the fog of vague recall, is a perfect ground for the narrative and allusive skills J.H. Crone has in abundance.

Female characters bear names with a Marian tinge: Mae the television reporter; Mari the bakery owner; a Muslim woman, Maryam; even an expert on religion called Maire: but this seems only fitting. J.H. Crone has come lately to poetry after a career as a documentary maker and editor, and though she has a documentarist’s skills with history, she also spins religion though everything, in the bakery, say: ‘Mari offers a slab of soft, air-filled / bread to Jesus, but she can’t eat. Perhaps / a caramelised cardamom brulee / tart? Jesus swallows a flake. Her dolour / pours out into the throng.’

There is conflict everywhere, between genders and faiths, and strange exaltations, as Mae falls/rises into a Catholic netherworld, and everything comes to an inevitable Cronullan climax – or rather, a set of blessed anti-climaxes. Ranging wide, with compassion and compression, Our Lady of the Fence Post might just be the first verse novel that is actually a novel.

The Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize – one of the country’s major short story prizes – is once again open. Generous support from ABR Patron Ian Dickson has enabled us to maintain the total prize money at $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $7,000. The runner-up receives $2,000, the third-placed author $1,000. In addition, there will be three commendations.

The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2017 issue; and the three commended stories will appear later. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony, to be followed by a jolly good party.

As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English). The 2015 Jolley Prize was won by Rob Magnuson Smith, who is based in the United Kingdom. Josephine Rowe won in 2016.

It is simple to enter. This year we’re also making it more attractive to enter. Current ABR subscribers can do so at the concessional rate ($15 per story). Students at high schools and universities can now enter all our prizes at the concessional rate. New subscribers to ABR Online (which costs $50) can enter their first story free of charge.

Non-subscribers pay $25 per story. This year they will receive ABR Online free of charge for three months – beguiling reading as they await their next short story.

Visit our Jolley Prize page for more details. Writers have until 10 April to enter.

Vale Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard (photograph by Nancy Crampton)As we were going to press, we learned of the death of Shirley Hazzard, one of the finest novelists and prose stylists Australia has produced.

Aged eighty-five, she died in New York, where (when not in Europe) she lived for decades with her husband, the late Francis Steegmuller, the great Flaubertian.

Hazzard’s relatively small, choice body of work – five novels, two short story collections, some non-fiction – places her in the pantheon of great Australia writers. Her first book, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963), is a classic of the genre, and many critics would rate The Transit of Venus (1980) as one of the finest novels to be produced by an Australian (Hazzard moved to the United States in 1951 and later became a US citizen). Her next and last novel, The Great Fire (2003), won the National Book Award and the Miles Franklin Award.

We will publish an appreciation of this supremely stylish Jamesian novelist in a coming issue.

Inauguration Blues

So it has come to this! On 20 January (a day that may well live in infamy), Donald John Trump – that serial bankrupt and television bully, that vilifier of women and union workers, that bilious flayer of opponents and the press, that admirer of Vladimir Putin and Nursultan Nazarbayev and their ilk – will be sworn in as the forty-fifth president of the United States. (We liked the New Yorker cartoon about setting the alarm clock for 2020, though worse might follow Trump.)

Advances wishes it could report that Philip Roth – America’s great moralist and scold – has come out of retirement to write a sequel to his apt and terrifying novel The Plot Against America (2004).

Fellowships Galore

Last month we introduced our newest Fellowship: the ABR Gender Fellowship, which is worth $7,500. Interested writers, scholars, and commentators have until 1 February to apply. We are looking for proposals for a substantial article on gender in contemporary Australian creative writing in all its forms. This Fellowship is funded by ABR Patron and long-time Board member Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO, a former Vice-Chancellor of Flinders University.

We now have two other Fellowships on offer, each worth $7,500. Applications close on 10 March.

The ABR Eucalypt Fellowship (formerly the ABR Dahl Fellowship) is presented for the third time, with support from Eucalypt Australia and ABR Patrons. Proposals are sought for an article on the Australian eucalypt in all its forms, with reference to literature, science and natural history, Indigenous subjects, history, the arts, or politics. This Fellowship article will appear in our annual Environment issue later this year.

The ABR RAFT Fellowship is offered for the second time (historian Alan Atkinson inaugurated it with a memorable essay on the national conscience in our September 2016 issue). We welcome proposals for an article on any aspect of the role and significance of religion in society and culture. This Fellowship is funded by the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust.

Those thinking of applying are always encouraged to email Peter Rose first, with an outline of their proposed article: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Vale Anne Deveson and Georgia Blain

Journalist, broadcaster, and filmmaker Anne Deveson and her novelist daughter, Georgia Blain, both died in December, within days of each other. Blain had been diagnosed with brain cancer the previous year.

Anne Deveson had a long career as a journalist, first in London, later in Australia, with the ABC. She was also an influential radio presenter at 2GB. Her memoir Tell Me I’m Here (1991), chronicled her son’s struggles with schizophrenia. Her documentary film Spinning Out (1991) examined the illness in relation to its effect on family members.

Georgia Blain

Last month, in our Books of the Year feature Georgia Blain’s final novel, Between a Wolf and a Dog (Scribe, 2016), was nominated in ABR’s 2016 ‘Books of the Year’ and ‘Publisher Picks’ features by James Bradley, Fiona Wright, and Jane Palfreyman.