The publication of the much-delayed Chilcot Report on the origins and consequences of Britain’s participation in the Iraq war has had its resonances, but they would have been more profound had it been published two or three years ago. It is hard on John Chilcot that his Report has had to compete in the public mind with Brexit and Donald Trump. Furthermore, in a general sense, most people had already made up their minds about the Iraq war.

Certain themes suffuse Bernhard Schlink’s fiction: memory, mystery, secrets, guilt, shame. Schlink mixes them in various permutations and intensities, but they are ever present in novels that have vaulting philosophical ambition beneath their simple narratives.

From the outside, America seems defined by its brutal polarities – political, racial, moral, economic, geographic. The Disunited States of America. From the inside, the picture is more complex; American life is not lived at these extremes, but in the murky, transitional spaces between them. George Saunders’s much-anticipated novel Lincoln in the Bardo is set in another murky, transitional space – between life and death – a space that proves a powerful allegory for the desires and sorrows of a nation conceived in liberty, but forged in blood.

The Empire over which Queen Victoria ruled for more than sixty years no longer paints the globe red. Yet Victoria is still ubiquitous. She is memorialised in the Commonwealth of Australia – formally proclaimed just three weeks before she died on 22 January 1901 – in the names of two states and innumerable other places, along with material objects like statues and portraits. The popular image of her is impassive and monumental, while ‘Victorian’ as an adjective is generally pejorative, implying earnestness in all things, and repression in most.

Julia Baird’s ‘intimate biography’ sets out to question such assumptions. Historian by training, journalist by profession, the Australian Baird was encouraged to take on the project by her editor at Newsweek during the 2008 US presidential election, stimulated initially by questions to do with women and high office.

Baird’s thesis is a deceptively simple one, encapsulated in the title ‘Victoria the Queen’, with its implicit tension between the woman and the monarch. The historian approaches her task sharply attuned to the accreted layers of interpretation that surround her subject. Her declaration in a ‘General note’ preceding nearly 120 pages of annotation may appear to be the manifesto of a very literal empirical historian: ‘All passages that discuss what Victoria was thinking, feeling, or wearing are based directly on journal entries, letters, and other contemporaneous evidence’ duly referenced. In fact, the note announces a mission of recuperation, both of material not previously utilised, and of documentary sources that have been demonstrably manipulated: Victoria’s journals by her youngest and longest-surviving child, Beatrice; her letters by ‘Two old Etonians’ who ‘warped our view of Queen Victoria for decades’. The meta-narrative of how the life of Queen Victoria has been written is continued into the present, in a scrupulous account of the barriers that Baird encountered even to gain access to material in the Royal Archives. Only with the intervention of Quentin Bryce as governor-general of Australia did Baird gain admission, but although she acknowledges exemplary assistance from the Keepers of the collections, she also describes an attempt to restrain her from publication of certain material (diaries of Victoria’s last medical attendant, Sir James Reid – which in fact had already been published, and in any case do not form part of the royal collection). The sore point is the queen’s relationship with her Scottish servant John Brown. Baird maintains convincingly that it was extremely close, whether a physical affair in her view ‘not proven’. Certainly, what she uncovers about royal sensitivities over time provides unequivocal demonstration that generations of the royal family and their retainers have been extraordinarily defensive about Victoria’s relationship with the man her children and household referred to as ‘the Queen’s stallion’.

Queen Victoria smiling at her Golden Jubilee in 1887 (photograph by Charles Knight, Wikimedia Commons)Baird gives Victoria both personality and physical presence. She offers a child wilful and prone to outbursts of temper (a tendency evident throughout her life), who developed and maintained strong attitudes and opinions not always consistent with each other. She was a talented artist. This Victoria is a working woman, no cipher, who took her job seriously and to the end of her life actively participated in the business of government to the point of being meddlesome, for instance in the conduct of the African wars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The extraordinary dialectic between her paramount regal authority and uxorial submission to husband as master is demonstrated in detail.

Albert, the Prince Consort, has a starring role, with applause both for his abilities as statesman, organiser, and entrepreneur, and for his lesser-known capacity for tenderness and fun. Whatever his health issues – he is said not to have been strong, and Baird conjectures that he may have suffered from Crohn’s disease – he was evidently virile. Baird is explicit about Victoria’s high libido and its correlate, her obstetric history. She bore nine children between 1840 and 1857, welcoming the availability of chloroform for her eighth confinement (the haemophiliac Prince Leopold in 1853). She considered breastfeeding abhorrent and didn’t much like babies, but warmed to children: it is curious, if perhaps irrelevant, that she detested cruelty to animals.

In the short to medium term, her absorption by childbearing and rearing gave the opening for Albert to become king in all but name. In the longer term, she suffered the consequences. Postmortem examination showed a prolapsed uterus and ventral hernia, apparently never diagnosed or treated, both painful conditions liable to further physical repercussions. It is also salutary to be reminded that several times throughout her reign there was concern that Victoria might have porphyria and be going mad. It is now conjectured that she and her oldest child, Vicky, had a mild version of the poorly understood disorder that overtook her paternal grandfather, George III.

Queen Victoria at right, flanked by her daughter Victoria, Crown Prince of Prussia, her grand-daughter Charlotte, Princess Bernhard of Saxe-Meiningen and with her arm around her great grand-daughter Princess Feodore of Saxe-Meiningen (photograph by Carl Backofen, Wikimedia Commons)Baird reminds us that Victoria lived and reigned for a very long time, but does not privilege any one period: hence attention to her birth and childhood, through accession, marriage, the histrionic mourning for Albert, down to her apotheosis as queen empress. Received accounts are persistently qualified by fresh research and new readings of previous studies. Throughout there is illumination, often of what might have been, beginning with the race to produce an heir among the six brothers of George IV. The succession, not only to the British throne, but to many European kingdoms and lesser domains, was a constant concern of Victoria and Albert from the birth of Princess Victoria in 1840 on. Often it is the sidelights that are most telling. So we learn that after the lengthy ritual of her coronation and procession through London, the queen returned to Buckingham Palace and washed her dog Dash. Such detail is largely responsible for the originality and liveliness of this biography, and the impressive concision and authority with which major political, social, and economic issues are discussed. Baird’s learning is substantial, and lightly worn.

This volume is itself monumental, and like its subject a triumph of thoughtful discipline. In round figures, it is 750 pages of which 250 are apparatus. I confess to loving a good index, and this is one, and I was gratified by having also a ‘Cast of Characters’ with a paragraph on each, excellent maps – very useful and left to tell their own tale – a judiciously pruned family tree, and generous notes. Among the many illustrations, some in full colour, there is a rare photograph of Victoria smiling, taken during her Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1887. The image exemplifies the unexpected perspectives on Victoria the Queen developed in this important and at times enthralling study.

Mark Colvin’s fine memoir – of a journalist’s life and as a spy’s son – was completed before the Macquarie Dictionary chose ‘fake news’ as its word of the year, and the OED and Merriam-Webster opted for ‘post truth’ and ‘surreal’. In July 2016, as Colvin was writing his acknowledgments chapter, Donald Trump was being nominated as the Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. Colvin does not mention Trump’s name. But his entire book – a principled insider’s history of the craft of journalism, of Cold War politics, espionage, and the pivotal political events of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – is a counter-instance to ‘fake news’ and the hyperventilating culture which spawns it. It is also a bracing reminder that the fourth estate – in its now myriad manifestations – remains the necessary counterweight to the abuse of power and to oligarchic or autocratic rule.

As I was rereading Colvin in New Jersey in January, six days before the presidential inauguration, Carl Bernstein appeared on television in his role as a contributing editor to CNN’s new investigative unit. Asked how journalists should conduct themselves in the new political order, the Watergate veteran replied: ‘By getting the best obtainable version of the truth, which is our mission.’  When asked for his response to Trump, Bernstein said simply ‘I don’t know enough. I’d have to do the reporting.’

Paul Keating has been much written about; his trajectory is familiar. His is a story of leadership and the exercise of power, about a man who led from the front and – like Gough Whitlam – was willing to ‘crash through or crash’ when following his convictions. No prime minister since has displayed a similar propensity. Troy Bramston’s biography conforms to that account. There is new material upon which to reflect, a valuable fleshing out of decisions, policies, and events, but there are no startling revelations that would cause one to revise the Keating life history. Still, this is a book with considerable virtues.

Its daunting length is offset with manageable sub-sections within chapters, providing logical reading breaks which nonetheless connect fluently with subsequent sections. Bramston’s capacity for clear narrative exposition maintains one’s engagement. His work is unusually well-informed, the product of diligent and intelligent research. It is enormously comprehensive, with a level of detail that no previous work on Keating has achieved. It has the advantage, granted to few, of Keating’s cooperation. It provides a deep history of the federal parliamentary Labor Party of Keating’s time, of caucus and cabinet, and of virtually every major policy issue with which he was concerned. It amply justifies the contention that Keating was a remarkable politician and a formidable leader whose boldness has rarely been matched. This is the best biography of Keating yet produced, and arguably the best single source for those needing an insight into this subject. This is indispensable reading, then, but with caveats.

Bramston is, he concedes, a ‘broadly favourable’ biographer. This does not prevent him from considering the views of those who disagreed with, or even hated, Keating. Hence the book rightly registers many of the arguments and questions that others have raised about such an intensely committed policy activist – not only the reform breakthroughs, but also the corrosive aggression, and the unforeseen consequences of, and (sometimes) the collateral damage from, the changes he wrought. Yet, in the main, Bramston comes down on Keating’s side: setbacks were, on this account, rarely a product of Keating’s decisions, but of incorrect Treasury figures, implementation failure, or the bastardry of others.

In this 750-page tome, Gareth Stedman Jones, a British historian and former editor of New Left Review, seeks to rescue the revolutionary thinker Karl Marx from the ‘Marxism’  he sees as the creation of his long-time collaborator Friedrich Engels and to reconstruct him as part of the nineteenth-century political and philosophical context in which he existed.

Given the luxury of space, Karl Marx: Greatness and illusion is a deeply immersive and absorbing account of the life, times, theories, and politics of Marx. His personal and family life is interwoven with accounts of the political turmoil of the era that gave rise to his ground-breaking work. The detailed accounts of vibrant café culture, heady and heated debates between leading intellectuals, and the ferment of a Europe in the throes of bourgeois revolutions evoke the heady cocktail of conditions that spurred Marx’s thought.

Marx was born in 1818 in the Rhineland, an area situated between France and the German Confederation. Europe was attempting to rebuild itself following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which had killed an estimated five million Europeans. An aspiring poet, Marx entered the academy and wrote a doctoral dissertation on the implications of Epicurus’s theory of the atom, pitched as a defence of the Hegelian theory of idealism that he would later dedicate his work to critiquing. As the revolutions of 1848 unfolded, Marx, his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, and their three surviving daughters moved from Berlin to Paris to Belgium to London, where they finally settled. It was in London that Marx was finally able to earn a somewhat stable living as the European correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune.

Maralinga is a name familiar to most Australians as the site of British nuclear testing in the 1950s. Less familiar are the earlier tests at the Monte Bello Islands off Western Australia and Emu Field in South Australia. All have left a toxic legacy in our history.

Elizabeth Tynan’s finely researched book on the history of Maralinga and its precursors brings to light a remarkable period of Australian history that serves as a potent warning against complacency and lack of critical scrutiny of government policies, particularly on matters of ‘national security’. As South Australia again puts itself forward as a guinea pig, this time for a radioactive waste dump, it is timely to consider the lessons of the past and just how worthless government safety assurances can be.

Australia was not Britain’s first choice for a nuclear test site. They would have preferred to continue working with the United States. But the United States, having won the nuclear race with the benefit of British physics (and Australian contributions from the likes of Mark Oliphant), proved unwilling to share the rewards. Cambridge spy scandals did not help Britain’s reputation as a reliable nuclear collaborator. Canada, which had also contributed to the Manhattan project, was second choice but quickly rejected British overtures once it realised the level of planned contamination.

Australia was third choice. Far from being the favoured child, we were the poor distant cousin it seems, who could be readily deceived, kept in the dark, and later discarded without fear of reprisal. The strata of complacency, and contempt, lie thick across this period of history. The British exhibited a breathtaking level of disdain for Australian interests – humanitarian, environmental, and political. The Australian government’s deferential and subservient attitude to the British was astonishing, if not profoundly embarrassing. Surely no one could retain any semblance of fondness, or respect, for Menzies’ ‘mother country’ after reading this book.

Far from being cautious about the impact of the testing on Australia, Menzies eagerly took up the British cause offering carte blanche for whatever land or facilities they needed. Australia even volunteered to shoulder a sizeable slice of the bill for site development. If Australia hoped to gain nuclear expertise through the collaboration, they did not insist on it, nor was it offered. In fact, Australian scientists, public servants, and even politicians were rigorously excluded. As Tynan reports, Australian suggestions that ‘a firm request’ be made to the British government for better access to information ‘seem forlorn at the very least, if not outright deluded’.

A fast-tracked development process identified the Monte Bello Islands off the Pilbara coast as the first suitable site, survey teams finding ‘an immensely rich natural environment’ today recognised for its globally significant marine biodiversity: the perfect place to detonate a twenty-five-kilotonne plutonium explosive underwater, sending up a column of radioactive water over one kilometre across and 170 metres high and contaminating a vast marine area. Further tests on Trimouille and Alpha Island were land-based. The Alpha test was the largest atomic device ever tested in Australia, which the British admitted was sixty-five kilotonnes although it may have been closer to ninety-eight. The atomic cloud rose fourteen kilometres in the air and spread east across the entire continent, causing radioactive rain on the Queensland coast.

Britain's first atomic weapon is detonated at Monte Bello Islands, 3 October 1952 (Australian War Memorial, Wikimedia Commons)

The Western Australian’s editorial assertions that ‘the Monte Bello explosion reverberates with a vastly increased assurance of British Commonwealth power and defensive security’ began to sound a little hollow. Public murmurings over the scale of these experiments did not, however, encourage British prudence. Rather, they moved their activities to Emu Field and then Maralinga, becoming even more secretive and devious. They continued nuclear testing under the guise of ‘minor trials’, probably in direct violation of the Geneva Convention’s moratorium on the testing of nuclear weapons, with little concern for the health of their own or Australian participants.

The fact that the area included significant Indigenous archaeological sites, described by some as an ‘Aboriginal Stone Henge’, did not give any concern. Issues of Aboriginal health or land rights were barely acknowledged, and the fact that some of the land fell on an Aboriginal reserve seemed to be convenient rather than an impediment.

Despite the impressive mushroom clouds of the Monte Bello tests, it was the so-called ‘minor trials’ at Maralinga that did the most damage. ‘They left behind by far the biggest portion of the radioactive contamination in Australia and were the subject of an active cover-up by the British,’ says Tynan. Paltry efforts to ‘clean-up’ made the contamination worse, scattering radioactive particles across the landscape. Efforts to keep people out of barely acknowledged danger were minimal. These trials could have been done in Britain, but would have faced stiff political opposition and far greater regulation

Former British nuclear test site, Maralinga, South Australia (photogrpah by Wayne England, Flickr)

Tynan has brought together a vast array of detail in this book. Rather like the plutonium scattered at Maralinga, the most powerful material is not concentrated in a single blast but is scattered liberally throughout the book. The sheer breadth of the story is astonishing: the barefaced duplicity of the British, the naïve sycophancy of the Australian government, the trusting complacency of the public and the ineffectual scrutiny by the media. This book is a timely reminder of the importance of active and engaged public debate in a democracy, and one that every Australian should read.

Inga Clendinnen, who died in Melbourne on 8 September 2016, was an historian whose primary research interest was the exploration of the social conditions of extreme violence in different periods and societies. She was born Inga Vivienne Jewell, the youngest of four children, in Geelong in 1934. Her father had a cabinet and furniture workshop, the income of which he shared with his workers during hard times. The family lived on a precarious footing, with frugality built into Inga’s early life.

Inga’s parents, she later recalled, were not happy together. They lived troubled lives. Her mother was reclusive, and was confined by household chores. To Inga, her mother’s domestic prison was partly a reflection of necessity, and partly a choice. That choice puzzled and then angered young Inga, who was determined not to accept a similar fate. Perhaps as formative were her father’s silences about the horrors of war. He had fought on the Ypres front, and harboured memories of losing a mate while driving an ambulance wagon. These images of horror surfaced intermittently until the last days of his life. The Jewells took in as lodgers American servicemen on leave during World War II, and Inga knew the wrenching feeling of hearing that one of them had later been killed and another blinded. The two world wars and their violence were palpable parts of her early life.

Inga read English and history at Melbourne, and earned a first-class degree in 1955. The wise tutelage of Max Crawford and the young Ken Inglis helped her to choose history as a profession. One particular lecture by Inglis on Melanchthon and Erasmus lifted a mist in which she was wandering. When she thanked Inglis for his help in enabling her to see through the fog, he left the room blushing from this compliment from a young woman considered by some to be the most beautiful student of her generation.

Drone

Someone says drone and I see the cell phone it tracks, see the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the arm connected to the hand holding the cell phone
Being tracked by the drone, see the shoulder manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand
Holding the cell phone being tracked by the drone, see the person attached to the shoulder
Manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand holding the cell phone being tracked by the drone,
See the people attached to the person holding the cell phone, attached by proximity,
By love, perhaps, respect, maybe duty, and the person I see is unseen to the drone and unseen
By the drone, is not seen even by the cell phone held by the unseen, who does not see himself
As the unseen while being tracked by the drone, seeing only the length of his arm and the hand
attached to the arm holding the cell phone being tracked by the unseen drone.

Someone says drone and I see the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe –
See the arm connected to the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe –
See the shoulder manoeuvring the arm connected to the hand that pushes the button –
Or flips the switch, maybe – see the person attached to the shoulder manoeuvring the arm
Connected to the hand that pushes the button – or flips the switch, maybe – of the drone.
And the person I see is unseen to the drone and unseen by the drone, is not seen
Even by the button or the switch held by the unseen, who does not see himself as unseen.
Someone says drone and I see two hands gripping their devices in the grip of each other
Each hand convinced that it’s the hand that holds the truth.

Michael Lee Phillips

Four Egrets

Four white egrets perch on four baby citrus trees
at the four corners of the world and you wouldn’t

see this if you were not told to look. Their black
eyes stare at the drying canal and stave hunger

for snail and frog and minnow because those remains
are not more than sinew or bone in cracking mud.

The two llamas and two horses in the chain-linked
front yard, the one tree in that yard that has been

stripped of bark and leaves, the four of them eating
hay that has been spread across cement – you would

not share their thirst at the moment you hope
for rain to fall on your dusty truck because you see

them everyday and their backs are not your dusty
truck. You wouldn’t see the barn buried under piles

of hardwood vine stakes or wonder what is inside
the barn in the no-light – you would not, before

it’s gone. And what about the distribution of bee
corpses from your windshield into fine dust under

the few wilted melons near goathead thorns? The hard
and tiny horns may stick to your boot and you must

shake them loose after stepping back into the truck
after taking a picture of the patch of weeds near sun-

bleached powder that streams across the upward face
of the asphaltic chipseal – and further out, you may

see the glint of shimmering mylar balloons that
have released their helium and have set themselves

softly down, like dropped testicles, displaying bright
round words that announce happy birthday or over

the hill and you would not remember what day
it was when you decided to try to be someone else

between shifts, between each appearance of your-
self embedded in the structures of everything but you.

Ronald Dzerigian

The Snow Lies Deep

the low fish
the late violin
the dreaming wolf
the mistletoe
the firefly
the favoured child

the favourite child
the deepwater fish
the comet fly-by
the tuned violin
the missed toes
the dreaming wolf

a dream of wolves
afraid child
missing fingers & toes
poison blowfish
clown’s violin
swarming fireflies

warning fire lights
screaming wolves
lowly violinist
flailing child
dreaming deep fish
kissing mistletoe

kissing missed you
firefly alights
deep sea fish flight
howling wolf rites
dreaming low child
flighty violin bow

low note violin
falling mistletoe
sleeping snowchild
darkened firefly
woken old wolf
cloud of flying fish

fireflies light the child’s way through the town
benthic fish gulp mistletoe berries down
last known wolf tracks violin-playing clown
and the snow lies deep all around, all around.

Jen Saunders

Laika

I’d spent the morning on the coast
where I’d gone to be away from you
and by extension, myself, the tabula rasa
of the sky interrupted by ravens
that had made of themselves a raised
felt collage in the shade. A kite surfer
was belting through the swell, too far
from shore for me to read the maker’s
name on the sail, but close enough
to see the line she was leaving in dark
green shelving like a fast download bar.
I climbed a headland to see where
I’d been, yet all but one compass point
seemed defined by the decisions
we’d made together, and even that
was swinging between hard south,
where we’d met, and our last night –
a nor’wester blowing itself out
like a trial separation. I walked to lose
the sound of us having another shot,
giving it our best. Cutting through
littoral scrub, bearded dragons,
like offcuts of distressed leather,
stared from lantana and twisted trees
the wind had cut back and down.
I crossed a road where luminous cable
was being unspooled, rolled out,
the national broadband like a cannula,
force-fed to the collective interface.
I went off the track, unpicking myself
from honey locust thorns. In a clearing
I lay down to watch husks of old blood
vessels bubble-chain across the sky.
You were out of range and reach,
like the retreating tag-end on a length
of rope at the stern of a listing lifeboat
taking on water. When I said your name,
a treecreeper quipped that distance
and wistfulness are all we need,
when healing. Starting back, with dusk
on the make and bits of moon
like stopgap animation through leaves,
I found a tin crate, broken at the welds
by impact. Inside, surrounded by glass,
the skeleton of a dog. I thought
of our kelpie from Working Dog Rescue,
her love of balls, her going back
and around a gull flock she’d follow
down the beach. She was killed
when a jet ski doubled back on its wake
as she was closing in on a stick.
I knelt beside the crate. I considered
the flight of Laika, the astronaut dog,
shuttled into obituary. A scattering
of bones and glass in a beaten tin box
as if she’d been satellite-tagged
and released, already deceased, to burn out
on re-entry and go to ground in the bush.
It was raining as I reached the road,
the lights of houses being turned off
and on by windy trees. I found the beach
gone under foam to the tideline.
It was there we had talked about how
to read the ocean, to find the direction
of a rip in a gutter. You said panic kills
more people than limited swimming skills.
I stripped and stood in the shore break
between the over and the underworld,
the afterwards and the as it was, listening
to the slurred pillow talk of the tide.
Your face appeared, your features
like a steady fall in barometric pressure,
like memory loss where the hard drive
of the sea crashes in to be erased.

Anthony Lawrence

and it is what it is

Chapter 1

You are given fingers before a mouth. Your ears are the last to form.
What comes next becomes what I am most afraid of –
I wonder where that wilderness in you was born.

Yesterday, they called me on the landline,
asked for my date of birth and nationality;
fourteen, zero six, thirty nine, China.

Nobody tells you to keep your hands
tied behind your back and they need to stay behind your back
they need to stay, they really need to stay.

Chapter 2

I want to cut something, I need,
I need the certainty of a clear division.
A binary, a slip, a something to keep my hands behind my back.

You write long letters about the man in there
who springs overnight.
There is nothing I can do, I swear it, there is nothing I can do.

They told me to tell you not to fight it
when it comes because when it comes it will rupture your
vocal cords, you will bend your knees.

I keep photos of us to compensate for your memory loss
though now when I hold them, they feel like slices of seconds from
someone else’s life, a life I push outside of myself, a life I have no care for.

Chapter 3

I told you so, I said that none of this would matter,
the clocks on your face would lend itself to surrender
and in the end it will all feel like a dream, a deep sleep dream.

I wake to find markings on my forearms, markings
raised like welts and I wonder whether it came from the
thrashing in your sleep or if I had lived some other life, become some other person
when consciousness slipped away, ashamed by its own watchman.

They told me to tell you to close your eyes
turn the self-immured blindness into a sea
imagine the arms of her insidious pull weave its web of comforting tunes.

You will feel less if you let it run through you
let the synapses burn through your wild river, and I will
start to tell you, to
neglect the parsimonious man in you.

Chapter 4

You take years to settle onto the ocean floor,
spread your skin like particles of dust,
entering the chain of subsistence they call
evolution, though I knew for one moment.

They cannot hide you behind their panoply
crust, gammon, imperviousness,
all at once it seemed impossible

But again the seismic undergrowth of something
I cannot see, something like a light I cannot extinguish.
You put words into my mouth now.

Stop.

You need to stop putting words into my mouth.

Jessie Tu

Sentence to Lilacs

‘And that great black hole where a moon ago I wanted to drown
It is there I will now fish.’
- Aimé Césaire

Europe, stolen schoolgirl, she
           radishes on the fresh
                      water creek
           snow on wheat ... I mean
no, don’t help me ... no, don’t help ...
                                   I have that lisp.

So I pitched my tent in the hotel lobby
chiselling pegs into tiles until they burst
like chalk under a hammer, wanting to sleep
though no one taught me how
                      Her stutter
                      Her personal pronoun we
                      Her stutter
                      And she leaves me
                      To the imagination
                      Stuttering a way of stressing
                      Her point

We’re not history’s country.
           I was driving among the mangroves
           in the photo. I was zipped-up, galoshes
           on pushing through swamp to watch
           the bird-watchers in the photo. I was
           watching them watch the distant marsh
           terns and dusky-moor hens. In the photo
           cockatoos scream as if the sky itself has split
           from joy, though it’s hard to tell from the

When I wake on tiles the sky
          I remember taking interest in
          like a tourist
                                  the sky
          being gone soon anyway

When I wake on tiles and clouds
           in long procession
                      like battles
           no one cares
When I wake on tiles reading War and
War is, you might say, unknown to us
                     our humanity never
questioned

To us the sky’s the question
that can beg all it wants
                     and Peace, that bit when
I’m not racist but the sky
                       and Prince Andrey
Waking on tiles
                      on a killingfield
           seeing only the sky.
                                   Its infinite
I can’t believe you’ve never heard of

knowing I still own the word
            deciduous.
                       Others might use it but they
            don’t know how to pronounce
                                                the silence.

Louis Klee

 pH

14 Sodium Hydroxide     Washed out:
                                         the unbalanced washing machine
                                         jitters and grinds across the laundry
                                         choking on business shirts.

13 Bleach                         Someone has poured bleach
                                         over the evening.
                                         We can’t stand ourselves.
                                         We raw and rub
                                         and exsanguinate into silence.

12 Ammonia                    A rainbowed slip of chemicals
                                         wrinkles and cakes in an onshore breeze
                                         against the east side of the island.
                                         They will trace it to a container ship
                                         bound for Singapore.

11 Charcoal                      She left the church early this morning,
                                         blinking and red-eyed.
                                         It’s too soon for Amazing Grace.
                                         That song rolled into the furnace with a coffin.

10 Soap                            Only losers are prosecuted for war crimes.
                                         The foreign correspondent footnotes
                                         chemicals blistering in a child’s eyes, and
                                         barrel bombs germinating in Syria.
                                         Skin doesn’t remain neutral.

9 Baking Soda                 Breathing through the balloon of their skin,
                                         the Corroboree Frog
                                         stops calling in Kosciuszko.
                                         Stained by a fungus dust,
                                         their skin skews and barks and peels.

8 Sea Water                      Human interest story: scientists weep
                                         a solution of sodium and potassium
                                         but can’t save them.
                                         There is something out of balance.

7 Blood Water                  should be neutral,
                                         but all day we ferried test tubes
                                         and paper tapers bearing tell-tale colour.
                                         The tank smears with algae.
                                         Even the hardy, brutal goldfish
                                         would gulp and bloat in it.

6 Milk                              The suncream doesn’t last.
                                         15 Overs under the pinched membrane
                                         of ozone that pales the sky
                                         and we are painting ourselves again.
                                         Itching all weekend,
                                         the boys blister in missed lozenges of skin.

5 Black Coffee                 She has lost all her friends,
                                         strained off by marriage,
                                         tired out by children
                                         and the local café is precious to her.
                                         We perch studiously on the stools
                                         sip our coffees and talk to the owner.

4 Orange Juice                 This is a good year for mosquitos,
                                         burned out by the government’s careful
                                         carpet bombing of estuaries.
                                         We can sit on the deck into the evening
                                         and drink a haze of bitter wine.
                                         Something in the strafing chemicals attacks bees.
                                         Next year will be bad for crops.

3 Coke                              In the machinery of God
                                         100 billion people have lived and died.
                                         The experiment must be nearly done.

2 Vinegar                         Most days the river runs white
                                         downstream from the mine.
                                         The bunds have leaked for years,
                                         the seepage pits are full.
                                         It’s a fragile balance when
                                         the island’s economy depends upon that silver.
                                         The earth eats itself.

1 Battery Acid                 We rarely kiss
                                         and even less on the lips.
                                         My lips are an acid etch.
                                         She leaves at different hours
                                         and numbs her way to work.
                                         There is something out of balance.

Damen O'Brien

In the summer of 1988 I was part of an Adelaide Writers Week symposium on biography, the stars of which were two justly famous and accomplished biographers – Victoria Glendinning and Andrew Motion.  I described that occasion at the time, like this:

I greatly admired Motion’s panache. As we ascended the podium to begin the session in front of a huge crowd of biography buffs, he was heard to enquire of anyone within earshot what it was we were supposed to be talking about! He went on to give a fascinating, eloquent account of biography in general and his project at that time – a biography of Philip Larkin – in particular. Victoria Glendinning too spoke with fluency and conviction. Neither of them seemed to have the slightest doubt about the legitimacy of biography or the reliability of what biographical research turned up. This was not to say that they regarded biography as ‘truth’ or even ‘history’, but they certainly did not think it was fiction; they considered that when you committed biography you produced something describable to some extent as a verifiable life.

The assurance with which they approached the topic and its intricacies powerfully intensified my own sense of unease. As a Writers Week neophyte, I was beginning to doubt whether my intended contribution – to explore and elaborate on some doubts about the legitimacy of biography by deconstructing the biographical voice into several of its possible component parts – was such a good idea after all.

Journalism is on the back foot. That’s putting it kindly. Hundreds of newspapers and thousands of careers have been consigned to the great media burial ground since the dawning of the digital age. Those still standing operate in a climate of deepening mistrust. From Trump’s America to Erdoğan’s Turkey, demagogues saddled with democratic political systems trumpet their scorn of so-called media elites.

Among those that refuse to die is The New Yorker magazine. Founded in 1925 as a ‘comic weekly’ under Harold Ross, it has proven remarkably durable with its signature blend of long-form journalism, highbrow criticism, poetry, fiction, and humour. I have my doubts about the wisdom of letting out into the world this superb collection of New Yorker pieces from the 1960s. Those were the glory days. In an era when so much ‘content’ is counted in characters, this is like looking at the ruins of the Parthenon and asking, what happened?

The 1960s were a different country. The New Yorker’s pages were stuffed with high-end advertising that paid the bills. Here is one example of how good the good times were when they rolled. In 1959, William Shawn (editor from 1952 to 1987) gave the novelist and essayist James Baldwin an advance to make a trip to Africa. Baldwin was a busy man, so he didn’t make it to Africa until 1962. On coming home, he decided he had more important things to write about than Africa.

An annual challenge: how to select essays which capture the moment but live beyond the immediate?

For some, rigour matters. The series editor for The Best American Essays invites magazine editors and writers to submit contributions to a Boston postal address. The rules are strict: an essay is a literary work that shows ‘an awareness of craft and forcefulness of thought’. It must be printed during the year, in full, in an American periodical. Unpublished work cannot be considered, nor extracts from longer works. The endless flow of submissions is reduced to just 100 potential essays and submitted to a guest editor – in 2016 Jonathan Franzen. The resulting volume includes a list of essays considered, so readers can test their judgement against the editor.

Geordie Williamson, critic and Picador publisher, takes a more expansive view. There are unpublished essays in The Best Australian Essays 2016: from Vicki Hastrich on art and death, and an unflinching reflection on her vagina and childbirth by Tegan Bennett Daylight. Most contributions touch on an Australian theme, though several essays do not. Williamson has curated carefully but says little about his editorial decisions. There are essays from fifteen women and fourteen men, with the women published first. The collection pivots on a discussion about football by Anna Spargo-Ryan, a homage to her grandfather’s deep love of the Norwood Reds,gently shifting the voice from female to male. Williamson has commissioned some pieces, sourced others from small magazines and web publications. Every rule offered by the American guide is broken somewhere, usually to good effect.

Brentley Frazer, one of many scoundrels in his memoir Scoundrel Days, documents coming of age on the boundary of civilisation. His father’s vocation as the only policeman in a small northern Queensland mining town subjects Frazer to a chaotic side of life: a lockup only a stone’s throw from his bedroom; housing criminals and murderous poachers; bloodied victims of domestic violence showing up in the early hours; and the aftermath of car crashes. His parents’ involvement with the new-age cult ‘The Family’ introduces perverts into the home. But Frazer embraces his circumstances with a kind of brash vigour, starting The Wreckers gang, drinking, smoking, taking drugs, and committing acts of vandalism.

Some ‘only’ children have revelled in that status. Iris Murdoch called her family unit ‘a perfect trinity of love’. Caroline Baum sees her family less happily as a triangle: ‘There’s something uncomfortable about a triangle: it’s all elbows, suggesting awkward unease.’ We find out in the following 380-odd pages the whats and whys of this discomfort. Some of it is historical; perhaps most is historical. Her father came to England with the Kindertransport. Her French mother had an equally traumatic but more singular childhood. Both were deprived of a normal family life as children.

Since Michael Dransfield’s death at the age of twenty-four in 1973, there have been two books of poems, a Collected Poems (1987), a study of his generation, Parnassus Mad Ward (Livio Dobrez, 1990), as well as Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A sixties biography (Patricia Dobrez, 1999), and John Kinsella’s Michael Dransfield: A retrospective (2002). Unlike other poets who died too young, such as Charles Buckmaster (1951–72), Dransfield had cultivated an older, more established group of poets who ensured that his many poems would be issued posthumously.

Dransfield’s best poems vary from ornate lyricism to witty satire to defiant protest to a playful, often tragic bluntness: ‘Nothing left but the / whim of survival’ (‘Overdose’). Paula Keogh, Dransfield’s fiancée at the time of his death, shows a more idealised view of the man than the manipulative and self-promoting poet recalled by some peers and investigated admiringly in the Dobrez studies. To Keogh, Dransfield was ‘a shy exhibitionist, sensitive and outrageous, old-fashioned and avant-garde, earnest and ironic’, whose genuine love and shared interests lessen her confusion.

The Green Bell begins with Keogh and Dransfield cutely romantic outside the Canberra psychiatric ward where they had met, but then reverts to the chaos of Keogh’s first breakdown, when even the doorknobs of her student college room were menacing. Her schizophrenic psychosis is bracingly vivid, and the subsequent treatments resemble those in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), with their routine of pills and electroconvulsive therapy: ‘A nurse stands to the side of a trolley that supports a rectangular black box with dials and cords ... I realise you don’t die once only. Death is not a one-off event.’ This is 1972, a year before Dransfield’s death, and treatment of those deemed mentally ill, or drug-addicted, is brutal. Both Keogh and Dransfield had lost a close friend at school; Dransfield was also grieving his father’s recent death. Keogh’s schoolfriend died mysteriously while undergoing treatment for mania in Sydney. (Chelmsford Hospital’s ‘deep sleep therapy’, from which at least twenty-four people died, is mentioned in passing.)Yet although they discover affinities and solace in each other, Keogh seeks a defined reality, while Dransfield yearns for escape.

Valerie Murray, born Valika Morelli in Hungary during World War II and, for the past half century, wife of poet Les Murray, has written an enchanting memoir of her early life in Europe and Australia. The description ‘enchanting’ is used deliberately. The brothers Grimm and their terrifying tales are deployed throughout the work. The metaphor extends to the writing style – spaced paragraphs of fractured nightmarish episodes interspersed with mordant humour.

Murray began to write about ‘the early me and how I got this way’ in 2003. With her parents both in nursing homes and deteriorating mentally, the project gathers urgency.

There are two children at the heart of this work; Valerie and her younger brother, Steve, both damaged by the war. Steve never fully recovers. His life is dogged by depression and a lack of self-esteem. Valerie too has suffered from depression and anxiety attacks. Identity is a confounding variable. The mother, Berta, is German-Swiss; the father, Gino Morelli, Hungarian with Italian antecedents. He is declared missing in action, presumed dead, after the failed Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia. Due to his skiing prowess and ability to survive harsh winters, Gino manages to walk home.

An odd thing happened after I had finished reading this short story collection. I came back to it a couple of weeks later, intending to write this review, and found I had almost completely forgotten some of the stories. Such amnesia is unusual for me. Good short stories generally set up a resonance that lingers, even if not all the details stay in the mind. Does that mean, then, that these are not good short stories? I wouldn’t say that. Uneven, perhaps. Some seem unresolved, more like fragments: although they aim at completeness, and are polished to a finished form, on some level they go on unfurling, not yet ready to declare The End.

This can be a good thing, a sign the writer is not complacent. I know Sue Woolfe’s work as thoughtful, highly intelligent, evolving over many drafts, the product of a mind intensely curious about its own creativity, as if she is constantly asking, ‘Now, what did I write that for?’ She has written about this process in her non-fiction books Making Stories (1993, written with Kate Grenville) and The Mystery of the Cleaning Lady (2007). So it figures that in her Acknowledgements she should analyse the common impulse behind these eight stories, written at different times and developing at different paces. She quotes from Death of a Salesman, where Willy Loman complains about his son Biff’s lack of direction: ‘Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!’ Woolfe confesses her own disgrace: at a much older age than Biff, she is still trying to find herself, and all these stories are about women (and one man) trying to find themselves at what Willy would describe as a disgraceful age.

Goldie Goldbloom has an eye for the dramatic and the morbid. Her novel about the real-life love affair, beginning in 1904, between artists Gwen John and Auguste Rodin, thirty-six years her senior, begins with a list of seventeen women – including Camille Claudel, Isadora Duncan, and Lady Victoria Sackville-West – whom Rodin allegedly bedded. One, we learn, was hit by a bus, one froze to death, three died by suicide, one from starvation, one in childbirth, one of a broken heart, one in the American bombing of Japan, one by accidental strangulation (possibly, it is suggested, during a sex act), and we all know what happened to Isadora Duncan. The last in her list is Gwendolen Mary John.

After a miserable childhood in Wales, Gwen John had followed her priapic younger brother Augustus – to whom she was unhealthily close – to London to take instruction at the Slade, the only British art school that took women. At a time when a woman artist had little chance of gaining the same education, training, and respect as a man, Gus thought Gwen the better painter, although it was Gus’s paintings that sold.

The story is told from the point of view of Gwen, whose dreams, fears, and delusions permeate the text, undifferentiated from reality. Lists of smells and sensations and remembered landscapes pile on top of each other. Gwen is haunted by a disquieting caricature of a Jew, apparently a figment of her imagination, that is a premonition of things to come, and other people appear at times to be witches or unnatural beings. The real Gwen was evidently an uncomfortable and needy woman; Goldbloom’s Gwen is also sexually voracious, almost predatory.

Kathryn Heyman’s novel, Storm and Grace, joins the recent proliferation of fiction by Australian women that deals with intimate partner violence. Like Zoë Morrison’s Love and Freedom (2016), it depicts the development of an increasingly troubled and ultimately violent marriage, over the course of which a woman loses her sense of self. Like Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things (2015), it is an indictment of the complicity of the media and other forms of representation – film, chick lit, ‘[a]ll that Fifty Shades shit’ – in setting standards of women’s behaviour, especially as it pertains to romantic love.

What distinguishes Storm and Grace is its narrative voice and reliance upon mythological forms of storytelling. This book is about the stories we tell ourselves and others. As such, it comprises layers of – often conflicting – narrative. On the surface, this is the story of free-diver Storm Hisray (the ‘deepest man in the world’) and marine biology student Grace Cain, who meet and instantly fall in love. In response to Storm’s plea that she ‘live deep’ with him, Grace abandons her studies in Sydney and travels to an idyllic Pacific island where they live and dive together.

Wedding Bush Road is a novel about contrasts and conflicts: new-age America versus an old-fashioned Australia; messy rural versus shipshape urban; high status versus low; the past versus the present.

Expat Daniel Rawson is a successful lawyer in Los Angeles. He has been tempered by seven years of ‘California dreaming’; life is good. His graceful girlfriend, Isabel, practises Kundalini yoga and reflexology. As the novel opens, we find the couple in a cabin in a canyon, cosily holed up for the Christmas holidays. All is mindful and embracing. Daniel has been planning to propose to her. From the outset, however, we also know that this idyll has already cracked, the mirrored perfection is already tarnished. There has been a phone call from across the ocean, a siren call from the parched landscape of the past; it is Ruthie, Daniel’s aged mother, down on the family horse farm in the flatlands of South Gippsland. She’s had a fall and, she tells him, will be ‘dead as Dickens by the end of the year’. Time to book the Qantas flight.

Ruthie’s vivid turns of phrase are jarringly fresh and direct compared to the more elegiac thoughts of her only child, as he arrives back home after years away. ‘I get my bag and roll it along the bluestone path to the big house. The long veranda striped by the shadows of the cypress trunks in the late afternoon, the lawn all but dead save for capeweed, the garden thirsty but overgrown.’ The ‘Toovareen Estate’ sign on the gate is drooping, the old homestead, once gracious, is spavined, and there is a burnt-out Mitsubishi in the middle of the bleached paddock.

Described as ‘modern literary noir’, Fiona Capp’s novel delves deeper into the psychology of its characters than most in the genre. The opening is sleek and pacey, as Capp guides us expertly through the central intrigue.

Ned is squatting in a boatshed on the Mornington Peninsula, having entrusted the investment of the sum of his and his sister’s inherited wealth to a childhood friend, who promptly disappeared. When Ned overhears a conversation between the politician Richard Morrow and a developer implicating Morrow in corruption, he sees an opportunity to recoup his losses. Though honest by instinct, Ned decides to blackmail Morrow on account of his sister Angela’s deteriorating quadriplegia. After springing Ned in his boatshed, Morrow employs him as a gardener, but from here the narrative lines spiral inwards.

Mount Barker, its surrounding environs and proliferating estates, might be situated in volcanic territory for all the ferocious eruptions of violence that occur in Rebekah Clarkson’s collection of stories, Barking Dogs. The demographic is noticeably white Australian. In ‘Dancing on Your Bones’, a loathsome consultant suggests the government develop the Summit – a sacred site – in response to a native title claim and name it ‘Peramangk Estate’. The physical absence of other ethnicities is stark throughout Clarkson’s book; even the Summit itself seems invisible to those living at its base.

The Oxford Companion to Cheese is an impressive undertaking with masses of fascinating and informed writing, and many illustrations on a delicious subject. It takes us from the origins of cheese – seventh millennium BCE – to the most recent technological developments. The scope is broad: as Catherine Donnelly notes in her introduction, there are 325 contributors from thirty-five countries (though only two Australians: Paula Alvela and Sonia Cousins). Together they have produced 855 entries. These are arranged alphabetically and are followed by selected bibliographies for those wanting more information. There is also a helpful, topical outline of entries and an appendix listing cheese museums around the world, some of which sound worthy of a visit.

According to The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum’s erudition is established through his ability to ‘converse on a great variety of subjects, having read all the best Australian poets’, a questionable achievement in Norman Lindsay’s day. A glance through the Annals of Australian Literature reveals the paucity of quality Australian poetry volumes published through most of the twentieth century, with selection shaped by the tastes of powerfully controlling editors, especially Douglas Stewart. Even in 1966, Max Harris’s survey essay on ‘Conflicts in Australian Intellectual Life’ – in which he inveighs against the academic gatekeeping of critics such as A.D.  Hope, James McAuley, and Vincent Buckley in the post-‘Ern Malley’ era – notes the limited opportunities for publication by emerging ‘younger non-intellectual’ poets. This situation changed dramatically for the generation of poets who appeared in the 1970s, with generous subsidies and the emergence of a range of independent and commercial publishing opportunities for poetry volumes: poets of this generation – whilst splitting the spoils along the lines of painstakingly demarcated coteries – responded to this opportunity by producing oeuvres often staggeringly more voluminous than those of the poets who preceded them (Kenneth Slessor’s 100 Poems would these days barely constitute a single publication).

As the editors of Contemporary Australian Poetry (edited by Martin Langford et al., Puncher & Wattmann, $49.95 hb, 690 pp, 9781922186935) explain in their cogently instructive Introduction, the assurances of this fruitful period were at least threatened, if not ineradicably altered, by the abandonment of poetry publishing by major presses in the mid-1990s, when a return to the deserts of earlier in the century seemed likely. That this didn’t happen was due to the energies of mostly unpaid volunteers in a cottage industry of independent publishing: previously regional presses such as Five Islands Press and Fremantle Arts Centre Press suddenly became more central, and they were joined by the collective efforts of supportive publishers like Giramondo and Puncher & Wattmann, who discovered that, with small government subsidies and limited print-runs, poetry publishing could indeed be made economically viable (though payment for the poet’s labour was restricted).

John Kinsella, who lives mostly in Australia, is a transnational literary powerhouse. Poet, fiction writer, playwright, librettist, critic, academic, collaborator, editor, publisher, activist; his activities and accomplishments are manifold. He is best known as a poet, and the publication of Graphology Poems 1995–2015 – a mammoth (and ongoing) discontinuous series of poems published in three volumes – brings together two decades of work.

The collection has ‘a tentative beginning and no possible closure’, as Kinsella writes in his prefatory note. The poems are numbered sequentially, though there are numerical gaps and leaps. There are thematic sections (such as the ‘Faith’ and ‘Forgery’ poems), and the final volume includes a number of appendices and ‘Mutations’. Like the landscapes Kinsella so often writes about, Graphology Poems is sprawling, sometimes messy, often imposing, and always compelling.

The pseudoscience of graphology is the study of handwriting, especially as a tool to analyse character, attribute authorship, or determine an author’s state of mind. For Kinsella, it is a beautifully ambiguous and generative master trope, putting in train numerous characteristic concerns: identity, authenticity, memory, place, representation, power, and textuality itself.

Which poets have most influenced you?

I first fell for the British Romantics: Keats for his sensitivity, and Byron for his humour, both qualities I try to exercise in my own work. Otherwise it’s the Americans of last century: the Moderns, Stevens in particular, and later the West Coast poets. I like to find these poets thinking (and sometimes running) in my poems.

Are poems chiefly ‘inspired’ or crafted?

The grit for a poem is found inside the poetic experience – a state of mind marked by sustained focus and deep immersion in a subject – and later crafted into an object of art. Paradoxically, a poem is nothing without craft, yet its craft must be made to look like nothing.

‘I come from a boardwalk town where almost everything is tinged with a bit of fraud. So am I.’ Thus begins the captivating autobiography of Bruce Springsteen. No treacly guitar man’s reminiscence, Born to Run grapples with the trickier paradoxes of family, love, mental illness, and musical success. At turns confessional and unapologetic, sentimental and honest, funny and devastating, Born to Run is a serious effort to tell the story of Springsteen’s life – how a young man from Freehold, New Jersey made himself into one of the great rock and roll musicians of all time.

The opening chapters paint a textured portrait of small-town life in America in the 1950s, a time at once idyllic and idealised. Springsteen, a wonderful storyteller, vividly captures the voices and emotions of particular moments in his early life – retrieving his father from the local bar; restoring discarded radios for resale at his grandfather’s workbench (‘Here ... the resurrection is real’); the welling pride of walking through the law firm where his mother is the head legal secretary.

Yet the hardness and tribalism of his upbringing are never far from the surface. The Springsteen home was not a particularly happy or easy one for the young Bruce. From his mother and grandmother, he was the object of ‘a horrible unforgettable boundary-less love’. His father – an ominous presence – was emotionally hostile and sometimes physically aggressive. ‘I was not my father’s favorite citizen,’ Springsteen notes with dry understatement. Other memories – his father in the kitchen drinking beer after beer in the dark – are haunting. The relationship shadowed Springsteen throughout his life.

Great books have been written on television. David Thomson’s Television: A biography is not among them. This surprises me, because Thomson is one of America’s most lauded film critics. To have his thoughts on television over the sweep of its history, viewed through his decades of experience, seemed a boon to me – a critic born in 1982. But Television judges its subject too harshly in a study that often feels painfully dated.

Taking on television as a whole is an admirably vast job. The term ‘television’ alone encompasses an array of meaning, technologies, and history: the broadcast of a coronation, 1960s ads, game shows, tonight’s Netflix comedy. The term’s meaning has evolved, as economic and technological change shift its methods of consumption, artistic quality, and cultural significance. Tackling ‘television’, then, requires structural and critical rigour.

Thomson abdicates from this in the introduction: ‘how does one tell “the story” of the television era? ... [T]he more I thought about that (and tried to find a structure), the more I felt confounded.’ It shows. Arguing (speciously) that he would have to cover everything ever made to do it properly, Thomson declines a linear history and instead divides the book into the ‘Medium’ and its ‘Messages’.

The rash of unsolved murders of gay men along the Sydney coastline during the 1980s and early 1990s has been in the news again. In 2013, Australian Story ran a feature on the quest of American Steve Johnson to have the coronial ruling of suicide overturned for his younger brother Scott, who died at North Head in 1988. Lateline followed up with a controversial interview with Detective Chief Inspector Pamela Young of the Unsolved Homicide Unit, who had been tasked to re-investigate Johnson’s death. Young was smartly removed from the investigation after intimating that Steve Johnson had exerted political pressure to have his brother’s case prioritised, a suggestion Johnson and the New South Wales Police Minister flatly rejected. Late last year, to considerable fanfare, SBS screened a four-part drama series, Deep Water: The real story, a companion documentary and online investigation into the murders of gay men around Bondi Beach and the eastern suburbs. (Addendum: on 30 January, the New York Times published an article entitled 'When gangs killed gay men for sport: Australia reviews 88 deaths'.)

You can see why this is a topical subject: murder, sex, mystery (the trifecta of the true-crime genre). Duncan McNab’s Getting Away With Murder is not the first book to cover these murders – journalist Greg Callaghan’s Bondi Badlands: The definitive story of Sydney’s gay hate murders (2007) traversed similar territory – but what distinguishes this book is McNab’s former life as a Sydney police detective, and one with a good working knowledge of Sydney gay subculture. From a law-enforcement perspective, this is an insider’s account into a lamentable aspect of Sydney policing. Too often, as McNab chronicles, the murders of gay men were lazily investigated and summarily dismissed by the police as suicide. This enabled groups of young thugs to roam the cliffs and parks of Sydney beaches with impunity, bashing gay men, which McNab mordantly describes as ‘the team sport of the eighties’. Moreover, as McNab sorrowfully reveals, there may well have been occasions when the gay bashers were themselves police.

The title of this book has a resonance that would not occur, for example, in a text called ‘Paris for Jews’. Most readers will approach the work with understandings and expectations shaped by Hitler and the Holocaust. The title suggests that Berlin is a different city for Jews than for other visitors, and that Jewish Berlin itself is different from ecumenical Berlin. Is this book a travel guide? Is it a travel guide specifically for Jews? These questions and others rumble beneath the chapters, gathering strength as the book progresses. Only towards the end do they start to be addressed.

Leonard Barkan’s quest, although never clearly stated, is to reclaim Jewish Berlin, with its rich and diverse history, from the powerful and seemingly inescapable dominance of the Holocaust. His book is intended as a travel guide to contemporary Berlin, a city that owes much to its post-Enlightenment Jewish residents. For Barkan, contemporary Berlin is Jewish Berlin. Even though buildings have been destroyed and the landscape significantly altered Barkan guides the reader to where notable Jews once lived, landmark buildings stood, and famous salons took place.

The shadow of the Holocaust is not so easily dismissed from any consideration of contemporary Berlin. Indeed, it could be argued that Barkan’s quest occurs because of the Holocaust. In 1933, when Hitler assumed power, Germany had a population of sixty-seven million people. Of this number, less than one per cent, about 520,000, were Jewish, and one third of the entire German Jewish population, approximately 160,000, lived in Berlin. At the end of the war only a handful were left, and most of their legacy had been destroyed. The roll-call of well-known Jews who called Berlin home includes Stefan Zweig, Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Mahler and Schoenberg, Heine and Marcuse, and a swag of physicists including Max Born, Leo Szilard, and Albert Einstein

The idea that the world faces a second Cold War started out as hyperbole, but by 2016 it was sounding increasingly plausible. For more than a decade, Moscow, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, had been waging a diplomatic, political, and military campaign to restore Russian power – in the Caucasus, in Ukraine, and in Syria. In the West this has usually been portrayed as unprovoked aggression, but Tony Kevin takes the opposing view. It is the West, he argues, which has behaved aggressively towards Moscow.

Kevin is a former Australian diplomat, regarded in Canberra policy circles as an ‘old lefty’. And not only does the argument of Return to Moscow recall those made by the left during the first Cold War, it is based on questions still open at the end of that conflict, crucially this one: was Moscow promised that NATO would not expand into eastern Europe?

If you believe that Putin’s behavior demands a robust Western response backed by military force, your answer to that question is ‘no’, or perhaps ‘that’s irrelevant’. But if you are Putin – or Tony Kevin – the answer is ‘yes’ and, rather than being some arcane historical detail, the issue determines your entire outlook. This is the sort of disagreement that starts European wars.

What does a lexicographer do? How do you become a lexicographer? What makes a good lexicographer? What is the difference between a ‘standard’ dictionary and a dictionary based on historical principles? How do you reinvent the Oxford English Dictionary so that it has a secure place in an online modern publishing world? These are among the questions explored in John Simpson’s memoir.

John Simpson was chief editor of the OED from 1993 until his retirement in 2013. Unlike some of his predecessors (especially James Murray and Robert Burchfield), he was not imported directly to the top job, but worked his way up through the firm from assistant editor (1976), to senior editor (1982), to co-editor (1986), and finally chief editor (1993). He had studied English literature at York and was doing an MA in medieval studies at Reading when he applied, on a whim, for a job with the OED. He was knocked back for the advertised position, but was offered another position on the rebound. And so, like James Murray, he arrived in Oxford as an ‘outlier’; he left after refashioning and reimagining that most Oxonian of enterprises, the OED.

When Simpson started work on the OED, he knew little about lexicography but learned quickly. At the time of Simpson’s arrival, chief editor Burchfield (a New Zealander) and OUP were not setting their sights on anything beyond the completion of the four planned Supplements to the OED. From early on, however, Simpson was disturbed by the tacit acceptance of the notion that the basic text of the OED was never going to be revised. He was also alert, more than most, to the implications of the emerging revolution in communications technology.

Good general practice is the cornerstone of a good healthcare system: Australia is blessed with both. Leah Kaminsky has been a Melbourne general practitioner for three decades and by her own explicit admission wrote We’re All Going to Die as a way to address her own fear of death. Her beloved mother was ‘the only leaf left dangling from her charred family tree, having survived the horrors of Bergen-Belsen’. She emigrated to Australia with a single suitcase and a butterfly marcasite brooch, now worn by Kaminsky in remembrance. Kaminsky’s parents met in Melbourne, worked hard, made do, like many in the Jewish community. They wanted Kaminsky to become a lawyer, where her capacity of empathy may have been stifled, wasted. Fortunately, she chose to do medicine. Thousands of patients in Melbourne have every reason to applaud her choice.

The book’s front cover, among the butterflies, bears a quote from the New York Times by Mary Roach, best-selling author of the unfortunately titled Stiff (2003): ‘A beautiful, brave, inspiring work. Required reading for anyone who plans to die.’ This is routine gush: the book is engaging but by no stretch of the imagination beautiful, the eye of the beholder notwithstanding. It is brave, in that the author examines her own fears and responses, openly, frankly, and self-critically. Inspiring no, but a very useful book for ‘anyone who plans to die’, and who might need help for a besetting fear of death, as shared by the author.

What was your pathway to publishing?

After university I knew I didn’t want to do deconstruction; I wanted to be involved with contemporary writing, so I looked for an editorial job and eventually found one, in Boston, which was no longer the Athens of America, in 1973.

Porter Prize

We received almost 1,000 entries in this year’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize – by far our biggest field to date. Entries came from twenty-two countries. The judges – Ali Alizadeh, Jill Jones, Felicity Plunkett – have now shortlisted seven poems. The shortlisted poets are Ronald Dzerigian (USA), Louis Klee (Victoria), Anthony Lawrence (NSW), Damen O’Brien (Queensland), Michael Lee Phillips (USA), Jen Saunders (NSW), and Jessie Tu (NSW).

The winner (who will receive $5,000 plus an Arthur Boyd print) will be named at the Porter Prize ceremony on Thursday, 23 March (6 pm) at the Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne (see below). First, though, a number of friends and admirers of Peter Porter will read some of his poems, and the shortlisted poets will read their poems. These are always great occasions for poetry (and Porter) aficionados, and everyone is welcome. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

More poetry gigs

To celebrate the second edition of States of Poetry (South Australia), state editor Peter Goldsworthy will introduce his new cohort of poets during Adelaide Writers’ Week. The six featured poets this year are Steve Brock, Cath Kenneally, Jules Leigh Koch, Louise Nicholas, Jan Owen, and Dominic Symes. The session will take place on 6 March at 5 pm, at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden, Adelaide. For more information, visit the Adelaide Writers’ Week website.

Single poems from each writer appear in our mini-anthology.

The April issue will feature a mini-anthology of poems from the Tasmanian edition of States of Poetry. Peter Rose and state editor Sarah Day will host a reading from the six poets included in this year’s anthology: Adrienne Eberhard, Graeme Hetherington, Karen Knight, Louise Oxley, Tim Thorne, and Jane Williams. The event will take place at the Hobart Book Shop, 22 Salamanca Square at 5.30 pm on Thursday, 6 April. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Trumping the media

‘Journalism is on the back foot,’ writes Diana Bagnall at the start of her review of an anthology of writings about the 1960s from The New Yorker. Sad to report, it’s an understatement, given recent developments. We all know the fate of countless journalists around the world in recent years: the arrests, the intimidation, the derision, the assassinations, especially in Russia (so close to Donald Trump’s commercial heart). In his first days as US president, Trump demeaned the office by pursuing his maniacal attacks on the media, beginning with a pathetic and fraudulent attempt to ‘correct’ attendance figures at his inauguration.

President Donald Trump being sworn in on 20 January 2017 (Wikimedia Commons)

So much was left to the thinking press during the recent ignoble election campaign: one thinks in particular of the New York Times’s exposé about Trump’s startling business incompetence and his record-breaking financial reliance on US taxpayers. Now it seems that the Times and every questioning journalist will pay a high price for their audacity. Trump, puffed up with amour-propre, resembles a drunk at a party who won’t brook any opposition or criticism. Now he – bizarre though it still seems – runs the United States. What price logic, perseverance, intelligent doubt? What future for investigative journalism? Will it be safe or even legal to practise or publish dissent?

And how, to paraphrase Diana Bagnall, did it come to this? The Obama administration, in some respects, paved the way. Barack Obama was no great friend of the fourth estate, despite his cosy relations with admiring editors such as David Remnick of The New Yorker. For some, Obama was the most controlling and secretive president since the paranoiac Richard Nixon. Menacing too. Time and time again reporters were stymied or threatened with prosecution. No other administration has denied so many Freedom of Information requests. Notoriously, the Obama regime threatened New York Times reporter James Risen with jail for his refusal to name a source. Risen has dubbed Obama ‘the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation’.

Jerkish plot

Philip Roth (Wikimedia Commons)In our previous issue, Advances wondered, with eerie retrospective prescience (to coin a phrase to rival ‘alternative facts’), if Philip Roth – that rara avis, a retired novelist – would emerge from literary exile to update his ahistorical novel The Plot Against America (2004), in which Charles Lindbergh, the isolationist and Nazi-inspired aviator, defeats Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential election and introduces anti-Semitic measures against young ‘Philip Roth’ and other Jewish characters in the novel. Other publications have followed suit, including The New Yorker, which interviewed the author for its January 30 edition.

Philip Roth, retired though he is and responding via email, still gave them good copy. ‘Lindbergh, despite his Nazi sympathies and racist proclivities ... had character and he had substance ... Trump is just a con artist,’ he wrote. ‘I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But ... neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English’.

MoMA takes a stand

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has responded impressively to Trump’s obnoxious executive order banning travel to the United States for citizens of seven Muslim nations. MoMA promptly removed some of the jewels in its crown (including Picasso’s Card player) to make way for contemporary art from Iran, Iraq, and Sudan. Each work is accompanied by a statement: ‘This is one of several such artworks ... installed ... to affirm the ideas of welcome and freedom as vital to this Museum, as they are to the United States.’ Jason Farago in the New York Times writes: ‘This welcome new voice ... is not how MoMA has spoken in the past – but, then again, this is not how presidents have spoken in the past, either.’

It will be interesting to see if any Australian galleries follow MoMA’s example and send a similarly ringing message to our super-ally.

Story time!

Since it began in 2010, the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize has attracted thousands of new entries and grown in stature both here and overseas. Now international, the Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500 (thanks to the remarkable generosity of Ian Dickson, our Acmeist Patron). Earlier this year, The Writers’ Academy from Penguin Random House in the United Kingdom listed it as one of the world’s ‘Best Writing Competitions’.

ABR’s commitment to short fiction doesn’t end with the Jolley Prize. We publish new short stories on our website as part of ABR Fiction, and we welcome submissions from new and established writers. Unlike Jolley Prize entries (2,000 to 5,000 words), the stories can be any length – though not Tolstoyan please. They must not have been previously published. We pay a minimum of $400 for stories published in ABR Fiction on our website. Please visit the ‘Submissions’ page there for more information.

Meanwhile, the 2017 Jolley Prize is open until April 10.

Kris Hemensley’s entourage

More Cordite Books have appeared, and one of them is especially welcome: Your Scratch Entourage, Kris Hemensley’s first collection in many years. Hemensley, who turned seventy in 2016, published countless books in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, but was then overtaken by – well, books. For many years he and Loretta Hemensley have run Collected Works, that gem of a bookshop in the smudgy old labyrinthine Nicholas Building on Swanston Street opposite St Paul’s Cathedral. Hemensley has done more for the circulation and appreciation of poetry in Melbourne – this country – than most. Collected Works is the first place to go to for poetry in Melbourne. How needed it is too, given the dearth of poetry sections in most general bookshops (Kahlil Gibran and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rod McKuen do not, alone, constitute a decent poetry library). Sydneysiders will be familiar with Kinokuniya’s fantastic poetry section. But is there anything this vast bookshop doesn’t stock. (Kinokuniya is situated in The Galeries at 500 George Street.)

So it is good to have this new collection from Kris Hemensley. The poet himself, who introduces it in a witty Preface, recalls ‘a year-long conversation with prospective publisher K MacCarter about singularity, locality, expatriation, eased by occasional tots of the Japanese good stuff during which I sometimes recast him as a Jonathan Williams, dual squire of Dentdale, Cumbria, and Scaly Mountain, North Carolina, notwithstanding the Minnesota Lutheran he owned up to be’.

Poetry galore

Yet more poetry. After all, it is our annual poetry issue. Despite jeremiads of yore, Advances can’t remember a time when so much new poetry was published in Australia. UWA Publishing has weighed in with six more titles in its UWAP Poetry Series. They are Rallying (Quinn Eades), Flute of Milk (Susan Fealy), A Personal History of Vision (Luke Fischer), Charlie Twirl (Alan Gould), Dark Convicts (Judy Johnson), and Snake Like Charms (Amanda Joy). The latter includes ‘Tailings’, which won the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Published in February, these paperback collections cost $22.95 each.

Dorothy Hewett Award

The winner of this year’s Dorothy Hewett Award is Melbourne-based writer Odette Kelada for Drawing Sybylla, a short novel ‘depicting Australian women writers’. The judges, Lucy Dougan, James Ley, and Terri-ann White, described it as ‘an intense reading experience’. In addition to a publishing contract with UWA Publishing, Odette Kelada receives $10,000 from Copyright Agency Limited Cultural Fund.

Two shortlisted writers, Carolyn Abbs (WA) and Ann-Marie Priest (QLD), were both highly commended and each receive a publishing contract and cash prize.

Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing

Entries are now open for the Monash Undergraduate Prize for Creative Writing (presented by Monash University in partnership with the Emerging Writers’ Festival). The prize, now in its sixth year, is open to students from Australia and New Zealand who are enrolled in an undergraduate or honours degree. The judges are Julie Koh, Khalid Warsame,and Rebecca Do Rozario. Entries are open until midnight on April 12 and the winner receives $4,000.

R&R in Brisbane

In the wake of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize for Literature, and Bruce Springsteen’s ‘thoughtful’ and ‘absorbing’ autobiography Born to Run (reviewed by Varun Ghosh in this issue), we can assume that the boundaries between music and writing have well and truly dissolved. The Rock & Roll Writers’ Festival in Brisbane this year (1–2 April) will explore this fusion in a series of talks. Speakers include Tim Rogers, Brentley Frazer, Kirsty Eagar, and Peggy Frew.

In true rock and roll fashion, the festival will hit the road ‘for one show only’ in Melbourne on 9 April. Visit their website for more details.