Is it surprising that Jeff Sparrow should write a book on Paul Robeson, the great American singer who was also a civil rights activist, a man of the left, and the most celebrated Othello of the twentieth century? Sparrow is a broadcaster and columnist, but he is also the immediate past editor of Overland, a literary journal dedicated to a mixed diet of – as Billy Bragg might say – pop and progressive politics, a magazine where reports on workers’ rights sit next to think pieces on Kanye West and the 2020 presidential election.

So why not write about Paul Robeson? He was, after all, at one time the most famous African American entertainer on the planet: almost the Kanye of his generation. Indeed, Robeson’s excess of talent still boggles the mind. The son of an escaped slave, he was a football star, a formidable orator, a virtuoso linguist, and a singer and actor of immense power. He fundamentally changed the way the world looked at black performers on stage, and to a lesser extent, on screen. When he played Othello in London in 1930, opposite Peggy Ashcroft, it was the first time that a non-white had played Othello in London since Ira Aldridge in 1825. He reprised the role in 1943 on Broadway with Uta Hagen in a production that still holds the record for the longest-running Shakespeare production in the United States. He was also an impassioned socialist with an instinctive sympathy for the underdog. He campaigned tirelessly for racial equality and the rights of working men and women everywhere. He was an uncompromising opponent of fascism, and toured Spain during the Civil War, singing for Republican troops at Tarazona and in hospitals at Murcia and Benicàssim.

To tell this story – or partially tell it – Sparrow scampers around the world, visiting the places Paul Robeson visited, using key moments in the great man’s life to reflect on a clutch of contemporary hot-button political and cultural issues. From Harlem to London, Cardiff to Barcelona, and then Moscow, Sparrow stays in the same hotels that Robeson stayed in and walks the same streets, searching for traces of a lost spirit, as if there were salvation in emulation.

He visits Robeson’s childhood home near Princeton and discovers that the area no longer seems so run-down or poor. Much has changed for African Americans since Robeson was a boy, but some changes have only ensured that things stay the same. In 1850 there were nearly 900,000 adult men enslaved in America; today, almost one million African American males languish in jail. ‘To put it another way,’ writes Sparrow, ‘more black people were deprived of their liberty in the twenty-first century than at the height of slavery, a comparison absolutely astonishing and deeply depressing.’

In Wales, Sparrow meets a woman who teaches local schoolchildren about Robeson’s special relationship with Welsh mining communities and culture. He admires her project, but is disappointed that her students are not also taught about the socialist ideals Robeson subscribed to. What a shame, he sometimes seems to say, that today Robeson is celebrated for his accomplishments as an artist rather than for his commitment to collectivity.

Paul Robeson as Othello and Uta Hagen as Desdemona, Theatre Guild Production, Broadway, 1943–44 (Wikimedia Commons)There are moments in this book when Sparrow does not seem on top of his material. To take just one example among many: he declares that Othello is ‘the one Shakespearean role marked as non-white’, despite the fact that there is a long interview here with Hugh Quarshie, who played Othello for the Royal Shakespeare Company, but also played Aaron the Moor in the BBC Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (1985).

Slips and misunderstandings like this add to the impression that Jeff Sparrow is more interested in his own anguish over challenges facing the left than he is in Robeson or his historical context. This book takes its place as part of a broader wave of retrospection and soul searching among veterans of the left who are struggling to comprehend activist movements where identity categories loom large, the politics of privilege-checking dominates, and where working-class perspectives are withered away to nothing.

It is against this background that Sparrow points his lesson. After World War II, Robeson became a victim of anti-communist paranoia in the United States. An impenitent Soviet sympathiser, his career was curtailed for more than a decade. For Sparrow, this is the inspirational high point of the Paul Robeson story. The most successful black man of his generation sacrificed it all for the sake of his principles and his vision of a better future, refusing to compromise or concede or in any way scrape for the government bullies.

No Way but This finishes on a melancholy note as Sparrow tours Russia, attempting to fathom Robeson’s admiration for the Soviet system. It is remarkable to think that in 1938 Robeson enrolled his son in a model school in Moscow, where he studied alongside the daughters of Stalin and Molotov. As Sparrow wanders in his heartfelt, gloomy way around the ruins of old gulags, he muses on continuities between Russia then and now.

Paul Robeson in 1942 (photograph by Gordon Parks, Office of War Information, Wikimedia Commons)In the end, Sparrow finds solace in Robeson’s firm belief in a better world to come. He must have started writing this book at a time when it seemed as though America’s first black president would be succeeded by its first female president. Instead, we have Donald Trump, a president whose admiration for Vladimir Putin is an ongoing puzzle. In this context, Sparrow’s final gestures of uplift and hope seem rhetorical.

Robeson may have been blinded by the legacy of American racism and by the monumental sacrifice of the Russians in World War II. Still, it is baffling that he did not denounce the Communist Party in 1956 over Hungary, like Overland’s founding editor Stephen Murray-Smith. It is also terribly sad that in the early 1960s, when black actors like Sidney Poitier were finally conquering Hollywood, Robeson, who should have been their patriarch, was lost in a maze of mental affliction.

The American critic Adam Gopnik writes: ‘Nothing is more American than our will to make the enormous do the work of the excellent. We have googly eyes for gargantuan statements.’ Paul Auster’s long-awaited novel, 4321, is a gargantuan statement. At almost 900 pages, the sheer physical heft of it is impossible to ignore. When a novel is as thick as it is tall, size is assumed to be a corollary for ambition. The question is whether 4321, seven years in the making, is excellent or simply enormous.

In the administrative fluster of Ellis Island, a Russian Jew is comically renamed in the immigration queue. His grandson, known simply as Ferguson, is born into a postwar America ripe with possibility, so ripe that a single lifetime will not suffice. Rather, Ferguson will live out four parallel lives – a quartet of Bildungsromans: ‘Four different boys with the same parents, the same bodies, and the same genetic material, but each one living in a different house in a different town with his own set of circumstances.’ As Auster’s title menacingly hints, only one will survive to adulthood, but which boy, and why?

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers should be aware that this commentary contains images or names of people who have since passed away.

You see them driving from Kings Canyon to Alice Springs, the majestic ghost white river gums depicted so faithfully in the paintings of Albert Namatjira. You would think you were looking at a Namatjira painting. And then there is the vista of the craggy hills of the West McDonnell Ranges in their mysterious blue hue – a signature feature of Namatjira’s art.

The ownership of Namatjira’s much-loved works of art has changed hands many times over the years and has generated millions of dollars in sales. No doubt copyright permissions have also followed – I say ‘no doubt’ because the actual course of the management of the copyright is unknown. It is owned by Legend Press, operated today by Philip Brackenreg, following the acquisition of the copyright from the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory by Legend Press in 1983 for $8,500. Over the years, there have been many instances of reproductions of Namatjira’s art in books, cards, calendars and on objects and garments, as well as auction catalogues – all copyright uses requiring permission and, presumably, payment.

The circumstances of the 1983 transaction are largely unknown. Albert died in 1959. In 1957 he had made a copyright arrangement with John Brackenreg (Philip’s father) and received royalties from the use of the copyright. In his will, Namatjira passed the copyright to his wife, Rubina. She died in 1974. The Public Trustee continued to manage the copyright and, it is understood, made copyright payments to family members. Why he determined to sell the copyright in 1983 is unknown, but it did mean that the copyright payments to Albert Namatjira’s relations ceased. Albert’s copyright will expire in 2029.

A History of New Zealand Literature is a rewarding collection replete with the pleasure of new information that is both strange and strangely familiar. I commend it for both its intrinsic interest and, for Australian readers in particular, as one means of redressing Australia and New Zealand’s mutual ignorance of each other’s literary histories and cultures. Here, I recall Lydia Wevers’s disarming introduction to her 2008 Dorothy Green Memorial Lecture: ‘I am a New Zealand reader of Australian literature. That makes me just about a category of one. The reverse category, an Australian reader of New Zealand literature, is also a rare beast though perhaps there is a breeding pair in existence.’

There are exceptions, of course, though not that many in view of the thriving literary cultures on either side of the Tasman. So I read this collection with a dual lens: one focused on the distinctiveness of New Zealand’s literary history, following its various narratives of ‘invention’ and development; the other calibrating connections and parallels between the Australian and New Zealand experiences. Many are acquainted with the literary traffic between the two countries: Henry Lawson, Robin Hyde, Jean Devanny, Ruth Park, Eve Langley, Antigone Kefala, to name a few. Perhaps less well known is the connection between the establishment of Australian and New Zealand national literatures in universities. The first university course on Australian literature was proposed and taught by Joyce Eyre at the University of Tasmania in 1947. Eyre originated in Hobart, but, prior to this post, had spent years teaching in New Zealand. Conversely, Winston Rhodes, who introduced the first university courses on New Zealand literature, informally in 1931 and formally from 1951, was originally from Melbourne. However, it is the shared shape of the literary histories and their similar preoccupations and anxieties that most profoundly connect the history of Australian and New Zealand literatures and where the distinctions are truly revealing, as this volume shows.

The collection comprises twenty-five chapters, each of around 4,000 words, divided into five chronological sections spanning from 1760 to 2014, though this colonial framework is also challenged throughout the volume. Part I covers the longest period, 1760–1920, and includes essays on travel writing and literature in both English and te reo Māori [Māori language]. Three figures are discussed in some length: Hakaraia Kiharoa (?–1852), who wrote down the words of sixty-nine waiata ‘songs’ in 1852; the British novelist Samuel Butler (1835–1902) who, in his mid-twenties, spent five years in Christchurch, where he made his fortune and drafted his satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872); and Katherine Mansfield (1888–1923), who is titled a ‘Colonial Modernist’ in a challenge to the boundaries of metropolitan Modernism. Indeed, New Zealand space and Modernist form are inextricable in her writing, where ‘New Zealand figures as the master metaphor for her aesthetic ... [T]he image of the misted half-hidden islands only partially and occasionally visible is paradigmatic of her method of apprehending and representing life’.

Part II (1920–50) covers the period akin to the ‘legendary 1890s’ in Australia in the concerted ‘invention’ of both nation and narration in the movement to independence (1947 in New Zealand). In this period, poet Allen Curnow’s introduction to A Book of New Zealand Verse 1923–1945, described by Hugh Roberts as ‘the ur-text of New Zealand nationalism’, called for New Zealand literature to be a ‘real expression of what the New Zealander is and part of what he may become’. Janet Frame (1924–2004) recorded the impact of reading Curnow’s collection, alongside Frank Sargeson (1903–82) and James K. Baxter (1926–72), as a student in Dunedin in 1945: ‘I could read in Allen Curnow’s poems ... about our land having its share of time and not having to borrow from a northern Shakespearean wallet’. This section includes chapters on how land and landscape were re-evaluated through both cultural nationalist and socialist perspectives, and how key literary infrastructure was established, including the magazines Phoenix (1932), Tomorrow (1934), and Landfall (1947); local publishing houses; and the New Zealand Literary Fund (1946). All of the chapters admit to complexities and contradictions within cultural nationalist movement, as we see clearly with two iconic writers of this moment, Frank Sargeson and Robin Hyde (1906–39).

The following three parts of the collection map continuities and resistances to the cultural nationalism of the previous decades as successive generations seek to broaden understandings of New Zealand literature. Part III covers 1950–72, Part IV 1972–90, Part V 1990–2014. Topics include the renaissance of Māori literature with Witi Ihimaera becoming the first published Māori novelist in 1972; the development of contemporary New Zealand theatre; new reading publics; children’s literature; and global markets.

Katherine Mansfield
(photograph from Archives New Zealand via Wikimedia Commons)The self-contained quality of each chapter makes the collection ideal for dipping into, and the high standard of the writing makes each instance especially rewarding. The 4,000-word chapter length ensures some depth, which is satisfying in terms of content and because it also allows the distinctiveness of each critical voice to be heard. There is also much to be gained from reading the collection cover to cover, drawing the threads of recurring preoccupations, drives, and anxieties articulated by both creative and critical writers, and speculating on what might be shared and distinctive habits of thought and language. Perhaps principal among the distinctive qualities is the strong sense of a bicultural literary culture which is not confined to chapters on specific Pākehā (European) and Māori writers but emerges as a wider collective understanding of New Zealand literature and society. This perspective is explicitly considered and embedded in linguistic patterns and rhetorical turns, which we find, for instance, in discussions of metaphor. Considering shifts to promote the distinguishing features of ‘Maoriland’ [an Australian coinage] in the early-twentieth century, Jane Stafford observes that, as it is ‘[t]oo insecure to stand alone, much of this language works through simile and contrast – nothing is, it is always like, or better than’. Later in the collection, Alice Te Punga Somerville discusses the range of English language and te reo Māori, as well as bilingual and translated works published in the magazine Te Ao Hou/The New World between 1952 and 1975. She, too, identifies the way metaphor indicates the negotiation of place and belonging. In the te reo Māori description of the magazine, it is a marae ‘gathering place’, but when translated into English it becomes ‘like a marae’. In the post-colonial context, this small rhetorical distinction carries the full freight of difference between Indigenous and settler cultures and their respective relationships to home and community.

The title ‘Te Ao Hou’ signals another key theme of this collection, namely a preoccupation with ‘new beginnings’. In numerous ways, this is a commonplace of colonial literatures, as all colonies are, by definition, new beginnings. This is not to diminish the particular and ongoing beginnings of New Zealand writing. The predominant impression of contemporary New Zealand writing and literary culture generated by this collection is one of a conscious interior focus with strong regional networks. Yet this sits easily with its ‘postcolonial postmodernity’ and its myriad, distinctive expressions of an original, fractured worldliness.

In the age of e-readers, this is a book to own in hard copy, because it is very beautiful: a hardback with a dust jacket in the pale frosted blue-green of a Monarch butterfly chrysalis, with a small bright parrot front and centre, wings outspread, reminding the reader that the word ‘refugee’ has its roots in the Latin word for ‘flight’.

Professor Viet Thanh Nguyen teaches English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Already well-established as an academic and scholar, recipient of numerous awards, he made his mark in the literary world when his début novel, The Sympathizer (2015), won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. With the non-fiction study Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the memory of war published in 2016, he has now, with this latest book, published three books in three different genres in three consecutive years.

Nguyen’s parents moved from North to South Vietnam in 1954 and fled to the United States when he was four, after the fall of Saigon in 1975. Settled first in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania, the family later moved to California and opened a Vietnamese grocery store. All of these events find their way into these stories; they mirror Nguyen’s own experience but are not directly autobiographical. They are not ‘about him’ but are, rather, about what he knows.

Fellowships galore

Elisabeth Holdsworth
(photograph by Antonio Mendes)The recent ABR RAFT and Eucalypt Fellowships attracted record fields, and we are delighted to announce the two new recipients, each of whom receives $7,500.

Elisabeth Holdsworth is the 2017 RAFT Fellow. She follows Alan Atkinson, who was the inaugural RAFT Fellow in 2016. In her essay, provisionally titled ‘If This Is a Jew’, Ms Holdsworth – novelist, former intelligence officer and clinical psychologist, and daughter of a Holocaust survivor – will explore the nature of progressive Judaism as practised in Australia, Israel, and the United States. Her essay will appear in due course.

Elisabeth Holdsworth is well known to ABR readers. Ten years have passed since her essay ‘An die Nachgeborenen: For Those Who Come After’ won the inaugural Calibre Essay Prize and brought the author to our attention – readers and editors alike. It remains one of the most popular articles every published by ABR – a searing, deeply poignant essay about appropriation and dislocation.

The ABR RAFT Fellowship is funded by the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust.

Stephen Orr (photograph by Philip Martin)Meanwhile, Adelaide novelist and essayist Stephen Orr is the third recipient of the ABR Eucalypt Fellowship (formerly known as the Dahl Trust Fellowship). He follows Danielle Clode and Ashley Hay. In his six novels (One Boy Missing and The Hands being the most recent), Stephen Orr has shown a fascination with Australian landscapes of all kinds, from the Great Sandy Desert and the Barossa Valley to the suburbs of Adelaide. We look forward to publishing his essayistic meditation on the eucalypt in our Environment issue later this year.

The ABR Eucalypt Fellowship is jointly funded by Eucalypt Australia and the ABR Patrons.

Advances notes that of the sixteen ABR Fellowships named to date (several more will follow in coming months), six have gone to South Australians, a continuation of that state’s proud creative contribution to the magazine, which was founded there in 1961.

We thank all the applicants, plus those who applied for the ABR Gender Fellowship, which was not awarded on this occasion. The Gender Fellowship, again worth $7,500, has now been reopened, with broader criteria. Applications close on 1 May. See our website for details.

Elegant fowl

We need all the humour and solace we can get in these trumpacious times, so let us turn to another New Yorker – Henry James, that is, circumlocutory genius and creator of the house of fiction. Evelyn Waugh said of Christopher Isherwood, ‘he never goes butterfly-hunting for a fine phrase’. Henry James did practically nothing else; only Vladimir Nabokov rivalled him as a lepidopterist. Fittingly, the University of Chicago Press has reissued an anthology of quotes from James’s novels, tales, criticism, and travel writing. The Daily Henry James: A year of quotes from the work of the Master ($34.99 pb, 9780226408545) was edited by Evelyn Garnaut Smalley and first published in 1911, five years before James’s death.

Michael Gorran, author of the superlative Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece (2012), introduces this curiosity, which contains epigrams like these: ‘When Milly [Theale] smiled it was a public event – when she didn’t it was a chapter of history’ and ‘Mr Longdon’s smile was beautiful – it supplied so many meanings that when presently he spoke he seemed already to have told half his story.’

In 1947, Simon Nowell-Smith compiled The Legend of the Master, reminiscences of James by people such as Edith Wharton and Theodora Bosanquet. Infants appear too. Borys Conrad, the four-year old son of Joseph and Jessie Conrad exclaimed, ‘Oh, Mamma dear! isn’t he an elegant fowl!’

The forthcoming ABR UK tour will head to Rye, in East Sussex, where James spent the last twenty years of his life. Lamb House is now a writer’s house museum, minus the famous Garden Room where James dictated his late masterpieces. (A German bomb destroyed it in 1940.) The UK tour (June 14–25) is filling up fast, but there are still a couple of spots left. If you would like more information, contact Peter Rose: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Unusual projects

Following our States of Poetry event at last month’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, which featured readings from the six poets in the 2017 South Australian anthology, as well as an impromptu reading and remarks by new Windham-Campbell Prize winner Ali Cobby Eckermann, ABR hosted a party at the Richmond Hotel and a good time was had by all. Among the guests was author Graeme Macrae Burnet, who was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize for his novel His Bloody Project.

Advances was amused by a recent Facebook post from Brisbane’s Avid Reader Bookshop and Café, which noted that a member of their book club had returned her copy of Burnet’s novel after making an unexpected discovery. Halfway through the historical thriller, the narrative took a surprising turn with the addition of a section filled with paleo recipes – His Foody Project perhaps?

Back to Booktown

The Victorian town of Clunes will once again be transformed into ‘Booktown’ for its annual festival for bibliophiles on May 6 and 7. Apart from sifting through a huge collection of ‘rare, out-of-print, and collectable books’, festival-goers can visit heritage buildings, listen to live music, and watch street performers. There is a writing, editing, and design workshop for budding magazine editors, as well as author talks from Clementine Ford, Kate Grenville, and A.S. Patrić. For more information, visit clunesbooktown.com.au

Ann-Marie Priest

Ann-Marie Priest, a regular ABR contributor, is the recipient of the 2017 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Ms Priest will use the $15,000 fellowship to write a biography of the great Australian poet Gwen Harwood, who died in 1995 – a much-needed and overdue biography, it must be said. This year, a special commendation award of $3,000 was created. Suzanne Spunner (Victoria) will use it to develop her biography of Rover Thomas (1928–98), artist and founder of the East Kimberley School.

ABR in Hobart

On Thursday, 6 April, all the poets included in this year’s Tasmanian edition of States of Poetry will join state editor Sarah Day and Peter Rose for a celebration of Tasmanian poetry at the Hobart Bookshop (6 pm). This free event will include readings from States of Poetry and classic works by Tasmanian poets, Gwen Harwood included. For more information visit our 'Events' page.

Film giveaways

This month, thanks to Entertainment One, ten new or renewing subscribers will receive double passes to 20th Century Women, starring Annette Bening and Elle Fanning (April 13), and another ten will receive double passes to Denial, based on History on Trial by Deborah Lipstadt (April 13).

I have been dazzled and baffled by this book. The variety of learning, showing itself especially in a range of beautiful and apposite quotations, is wonderful. The depiction of scurvy as subjective experience is brilliant and deeply sympathetic. However, parts of the historical argument are very hard to follow, and altogether they suggest that the imagination at play in these pages is more thoroughly literary than historical. This review is written by an historian.

Scurvy is a disease which attacks both the body and the mind, and it can be fatal. It is the result of Vitamin C deficiency, experienced over months, say on long voyages by land or sea. Jonathan Lamb is a scholar in English literature, working from Vanderbilt University, in Nashville, Tennessee; he has previously taught at Auckland and Princeton. In this book he is particularly concerned with the heightened imaginative sensibility brought on by scurvy, in its various stages, and he draws multifaceted connections between scurvy and creative writing.

The approach overall is exploratory and speculative, and the effect is often wonderfully suggestive. However, the book is overburdened with unproven and sometimes unlikely possibilities. Lamb’s use of scurvy to explain curiosities of literary style and insight is surely overdone. If an explorer is apparently obsessed with purposeless collecting, as François Péron was with seashells, it does not prove he had scurvy, and if he offers a minute account of an unremarkable phenomenon, as Nicolas Baudin did in describing an incident with an Australian snake, this can easily be explained by the scientific and scholarly habit of noting detail, even of uncertain significance. When an artist paints over a picture of icebergs with a picture of woodland, as William Hodges did on James Cook’s second voyage, surely the coincidence is too trivial to be proposed as an example of scorbutic nostalgia. The use of double negatives was common to eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century rhetoric. It does not prove scorbutic confusion. Nor does a description of the ocean as green instead of blue.

Ethicist, physician, and writer Eric Cassell has remarked that it is troubling that patients and laypersons consider the relief of suffering to be one of the primary ends of medicine, yet the medical profession neglects it. It is even more disturbing given that we are on a daily basis confronted with images of war, pain, and displacement. Rodney Syme’s book about ending life brings issues relating to suffering close to home. It reminds us about this facet of the human condition, even for those who have, for the most part, led tranquil lives. Increased longevity often entails a difficult expiration. Many of us will die slowly – perhaps of cancer or organ failure – or without dignity, as dementia robs us of what makes us human.

In Time to Die, the suffering and indignity of chronic illness, or a protracted death, are described, and the standard arguments against assistance in ending life, such as the efficacy of palliative care, are examined in great detail. True to the biblical title, Syme returns us to a more holistic view of the life cycle. He challenges the medical and legal imperative to extend life at all costs. In so doing, he asks us to consider what makes for a fully human life, even in the midst of suffering.

Unlike countries such as Canada, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, assisting death – that is, prescribing or administering drugs to end life – is illegal in all parts of Australia. It was not always thus. Between 1995 and 1996, The Rights of the Terminally Ill Act in the Northern Territory ensured that one could receive assistance to die. The Howard government’s reversal of this act in 1997 once again left many with few choices other than painful and often grotesquely ineffective ways of suicide.

Kate Grenville’s publisher wasn’t keen on her writing a book about fragrance. He would have preferred another novel from the author of Lilian’s Story (1985) and The Secret River (2005). But some stories won’t give an author any peace. This is one of them.

It begins with Grenville, as a young woman, dabbing herself with perfume before going out on a date. She wafts out the door feeling ‘sumptuous and sexy’. Half an hour later her head is pounding and she just wants to go home. It happens time and again. She wonders if she has a phobia about dating. In her thirties she begins to detect a pattern: when she uses perfume, she gets a headache. She loves perfume, but its promise of glamour comes with a higher than usual price tag. She discards all those pretty little bottles. With hindsight she wonders if part of the reason she became a writer was that ‘you don’t need to sit in a cloud of elegance if you’re alone at the desk’.

That is the last we might have heard about Grenville’s sensitivity to perfume if, in following decades, the world had not gone mad – or rather, madder – for fragrance (for which we can thank the chemists who figured out how to simulate the smell of costly essential oils, the basis of parfumerie for 4,000 years, with cheap synthetic substitutes derived from petrochemicals). By her fifties, Grenville realises that her headaches are triggered not only by perfume but also by exposure to scented products. Life becomes complicated.

When Australia’s living prime ministers attended the funeral of Gough Whitlam in 2014, there were considerable difficulties in taking the official photograph. Rather than grouping them in order of seniority, the photographer carefully separated Malcolm Fraser from John Howard; Bob Hawke from Paul Keating; Kevin Rudd from Julia Gillard. Animosities within ruling parties proved more long-lasting than those between them.

Few of our political leaders retire of their own volition. Mike Baird won praise when he did so recently, following the lead of Steve Bracks, who resigned as premier of Victoria in 2007 with his popularity largely intact. Most of our prime ministers, premiers, and opposition leaders either face electoral defeat or party coups, the fate of every prime minister since Harold Holt drowned in 1967.

Revolving party leadership has helped make Australian publishers punch-drunk on political books. As the line between politics and reality television blurs, and politics is increasingly reported as a farcical version of the Shakespearean history plays, the personalities and foibles of our elected leaders provide instant fodder for journalists and academics.

Chilcot and Australia

Dear Editor,
We cannot be reminded often enough of the perfidy that led in succession to the Iraq disaster, the continuing débâcle in the Middle East, the refugee outflow, and even to populism, Brexit, and Donald Trump. Ross McKibbin’s review of the Chilcot Report does this admirably (‘Whatever It Takes’, March 2017).

He doesn’t note, however, that if Chilcot, whose evidence ends at 2009, had been published sooner than 2016, Britain’s subsequent adventures in Libya, Iraq, and Syria would probably have been voted down by Parliament and the world would be different. Moreover, Chilcot was allowed to report the exchanges Tony Blair had with George W. Bush only from Blair’s side, while the agreement between Bush and John Howard, and its date, were not in his terms of reference.

McKibbin compares Blair’s foolhardy deployments with Howard’s risk-averse commitment on the cheap to the Iraq War coalition, and this was confirmed by an internal Defence report published by Fairfax in late February. But successive Australian governments have refused a Chilcot-style inquiry, enabling them to dodge responsibility for the meaningless, legally dubious deployment of troops to Iraq and Syria which continues longer than both world wars put together.

Unless Australia changes the way governments decide to go to war, more such disasters will follow.

Alison Broinowski, Paddington, NSW

Coffins and covers

Dear Editor,
ABR’s coffined March cover is not only the best one I have seen on the magazine, it is one of the best magazine covers I can recall. Chilling is what comes to mind. The brilliance lies in the ingenious way the consequences are portrayed.

Neil Spark, Howrah, Tas.

Kerry Reed-GilbertKerry Reed-Gilbert

Dear Editor,
Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s contribution to States of Poetry is a wonderful acknowledgment of an inspiring strong Elder. Her poetry is strong and deep, and her gifts to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders First Nations writers and the local Us Mob writers will be her enduring legacy.

Samia Goudie (online comment)

Kerry Reed-Gilbert, a Wiradjuri woman from central New South Wales, has five poems in ABR’s 2017 ACT States of Poetry, an open- access online national anthology. Next month we will publish a selection from the thirty poems published there, as selected by state editor Jen Webb. Ed.

Wellington rules

Dear Editor,
Margaret Harris (ABR, March 2017) observes that Queen Victoria is ubiquitous in Australia, ‘memorialised ... in the names of two states and innumerable other places’. I hope she will forgive me for pointing out that, using the excellent Geoscience Australia search engine, it is now possible to count the places and geographical features in Australia to which Queen Victoria still lends her name, either directly or by association. The results are fascinating. Of course, it is hardly a competition, but nevertheless the tally by my calculation is Queen Victoria, 148 versus Duke of Wellington, 466.

Portrait of the Duke of Wellington by George Dawe, 1829 (Hermitage Museum via Wikimedia Commons)It is a startling fact that no individual has been and remains commemorated more often in Australia, either directly or by association, than Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, Marquess of Douro, and Earl of Mornington. The map of Australia currently yields twenty-eight places or features named Wellesley; 126 Wellington; three Douro, and fifty-two Mornington. Wellington’s military victories are also directly commemorated: Seringapatam 1 (a reef off the north-west coast of Western Australia); Copenhagen 3; Talavera 6; Corunna 14; Salamanca 3; Nive 21; Pyrenees 7, and, of course, Waterloo 109, and even Hougoumont (a pub in Fremantle). The residences that were presented to Wellington by a grateful nation are likewise marked on our map: Apsley, no fewer than fifty-eight times (for Apsley House in London) and Strathfield Saye or Stratfield Saye or Strathfieldsaye (in Hampshire, which was to Wellington as Blenheim Palace was to the Duke of Marlborough), an impressive total of thirty-four.

Why is this so? Certainly, Wellington had a thirty-year head start on Queen Victoria. He was a brilliant general who did more than anybody else to unseat Napoleon (twice). Many of the Iron Duke’s veterans migrated to the Australasian colonies and made up a hefty proportion of the officer class right up to the 1850s. They obviously did a lot of the naming prior to Victoria’s accession.

Wherever you happen to be in this country, you are never far away from a spot that is named after the Duke of Wellington

Angus Trumble, Canberra, ACT

Tim Winton

Dear Editor,
The first two paragraphs of Peter Craven’s review of Tim Winton’s The Boy Behind the Curtain (ABR, December 2016) surprised me, with the suggestion that he could be ambivalent about the author’s writing; Winton’s prose, he suggested, was ‘sometimes just a bit too self-delighting’. I had never felt that way. Cloudstreet was the first book I read that made me reread paragraphs simply because of how well they were written. In his largely positive review of The Boy Behind the Curtain, Craven showed that he was fair-minded (and certainly not fawning). Geoffrey Wells’s response to that review (Letters, January–February 2017) seemed much less fair-minded. To imply that an experienced and often forthright reviewer like Peter Craven was ‘fawning to a fault’ seems quite insulting.

Wells expects a memoir to be personal, yet accuses Winton of rarely going beyond ‘his own outrage and sadness’. Who else’s outrage and sadness does Wells wish Winton to express in his own memoir? Apparently Winton is obsessed with his own personal feelings. As Brian Matthews says in his review of Winton’s other memoir, Island Home (ABR, November 2015), ‘Winton ... has little trouble in finding the words, tone, and rhythms, but even he seems to rejoice at times in the freedom of memoir ... the writer of memoir can be triumphantly personal, quixotic, eccentric, risky, and daring.’ Perhaps it is the quixotic part of this new memoir that bothered Wells?

I don’t think Winton is a ‘sacred cow’. As for the suggestion that devotees of Winton’s prose like it because they don’t have to think, question, and learn: I can only thank Wells for prompting me to go back and reread some of Winton’s work, so that I could stop thinking, questioning, and learning all over again.

Andrew Cronin, Robertson, NSW

The latest instalment in the Oxford History of the Novel in English is notable for having one of its editors based in Australia and the other two in New Zealand. As these editors admit in their introduction, this volume is ‘something of a hybrid when set alongside the other eleven volumes that make up the series’, since it is organised partly by historical date, tracing ‘the World Novel in English’ from its putative origins up until 1950, and partly by geography. ‘World Literature’ is a problematic and contested term in today’s academy, but the editors here understand it to mean writing from Africa, Asia, Australasia, Oceania, and Antarctica, as well as parts of the Americas (Canada, the Caribbean) outside the United States, whose fiction enjoys its own dedicated volumes in this series. Thirteen of the twenty-nine contributors to this book are, in fact, based at universities in Australia or New Zealand, and taken as a whole this volume tends to highlight literary production in this part of the world. This might well be regarded as a welcome corrective to similar works in which Australasia has been unduly marginalised, although if I were reviewing this book in Cape Town, I would doubtless be surprised at how South African literature is omitted altogether from the chapter discussing ‘Colonial Gothic’.

Even weighing in as it does at 500 pages, it is clearly impossible to cover every aspect of the ‘world novel’ in a project such as this. Many of the editorial choices of inclusion and exclusion are, however, quite revealing. As I know from having contributed to earlier volumes in this series, the general editor (Patrick Parrinder, at the University of Reading) issued a directive that contributors ‘should aim for a long-term, general readership and should not presume acquaintance with current literary-critical jargon’. The editors of The World Novel in English To 1950 have accordingly chosen to emphasise empirical forms of cultural history, the facts and figures of book publishing, rather than to engage with the more deliberately theoretical approach that characterises, for instance, the two volumes of The Cambridge History of Postcolonial Literature, published in 2012 under the editorship of Ato Quayson.

Until 2015, Australian Literary Studies was still a printed artefact. It appeared in the mildly erratic pattern endemic to Australian humanities journals, which depend on busy people finding time for the rewarding but often unrewarded task of editing. Nevertheless, despite rising production costs and increasing competition from the online world, it remained impressively extant, with a good number of articles and reviews in each issue. An issue of Australian Literary Studies in 2015 contained about ten articles, probably 100 to 150 pages. The focus of my review then would have been on the content: the editorial choices, the standard of scholarship, the range of topics.

What’s in a name? Academic Sue Joseph interviews eleven Australian non-fiction writers, a varied group which includes Paul McGeough, Doris Pilkington Garimara, and Kate Holden. Joseph is on a quest to uncover whether Australian ‘creative non-fiction’ exists here, as it does in other countries, and to understand what the term signifies to her subjects.

Either way, she has been warned off. Three notable writers of what Joseph would argue constitutes this genre disagree with its existence and declined the invitation: David Marr, Helen Garner, and Chloe Hooper. Indeed, many of her interviewees reject the label. But Joseph strives to be a ‘champion’ of this area.

John Kinsella’s short stories are the closest thing Australians have to Ron Rash’s tales of washed-out rural America, where weakened and solitary men stand guard over their sad patch of compromised integrity in a world of inescapable poverty, trailer homes, uninsured sickness, and amphetamine wastage. Poe’s adventure stories and internally collapsing characters lightly haunt the short fiction of Rash and Kinsella. Like Rash, Kinsella can write acute and unforgettable stories about threatened masculinity. Kinsella’s latest collection, Old Growth, closely follows his 2016 work Crow’s Breath in subject and design. Although he is best known as a fine poet, these stories add considerably to his stature as a prose writer.

Old Growth is concerned with environmental degradation, small-town contempt for outsiders, and indigenous people, children who need protection from adults and one another, lives lost to compromise, terrible miscalculations of the motives of others, and isolation, particularly the geographical and emotional isolation of women. These stories are not overly concerned with exquisite observation of the natural world; the emphasis falls on the need for environmental protection and the exposure of rural social destructiveness, but when Kinsella turns his attention to nature the results are remarkable:

The jewel beetle rainbowed in the sun and he was, momentarily, caught in its colours, part of its exoskeleton. This is what God is, he said aloud, full of joy. I don’t really get depressed, he told the doctor his mother took him to. I am really quite happy, he insisted. The jewel beetle went to the edge of the leaf like a rhino, clumping across a sponge world, and then amazingly and beautifully angled itself around the leaf’s furry and serrated edge, and was walking upside down in defiance of all, the sun shining through the leaf like skin and lighting the inner life, the shadow upside-down world, the jewel beetle soul.

In the New England summer of 1825, the residents of Cornwall, Connecticut, built a funeral pyre in the middle of their village green. From a nearby window, nineteen-year-old Harriett Gold watched as the flames leapt into the sky, her heart consumed with ‘anguish’. Among those burning Harriett’s effigy was her brother, Stephen, who, like nearly all of the town’s citizens, had turned against her since the banns of Harriett’s marriage to the young Cherokee Elias Boudinot were posted on the door of the Congregational Church a few weeks earlier. In the same notice, church elders, many of whom were close friends of Harriett’s parents, openly condemned her flagrant intention to marry across racial boundaries. Although the marriage went ahead, it was nonetheless, the elders declared, ‘criminal’ and ‘evil’, ‘an outrage upon public feeling’. Forced to run the gauntlet of social opprobrium and lynch mobs who eventually ran her out of town, Harriett, as Ann McGrath eloquently writes, was bravely ‘swimming downstream, against the tide of history ... against the assumed order of things’.

The harrowing yet ultimately inspiring story of Harriett and Elias, and their determination to marry in the face of overwhelming resistance – they eventually fled south, bringing up their children within the welcoming arms of the Cherokee ‘nation’ – is one of several intimate, ‘transnational’ histories of interracial sex and marriage in nineteenth-century United States and early twentieth-century Australia brought powerfully to life in McGrath’s Illicit Love. McGrath grew up in Queensland in the 1960s and 1970s, where Aboriginal people had been erased from the landscape, as if ‘they had never shared the same spaces, let alone fallen in love or gotten married, or lived in our streets, on their land, and among us all’, an experience that shaped the direction of her future work as an historian.

We are often told that baby boomers reshaped every stage of life they passed through. They are the most liberal-minded, creative, self-assured – and most of all, lucky – generation in history. Pop music, the sexual revolution, environmentalism, the internet – there is little, it seems, they have not been responsible for in the modern world. As they approach their sixties and seventies, however, this generation has become prey to another, unwelcome set of assumptions. They are unemployable after fifty. They don’t understand technology. They hog property, causing housing crises. They use an unfair proportion of health resources. As with all generalisations, there is a teaspoon of truth in these perspectives, but also inaccurate stereotypes by the bucketful.

Peak, by social scientists Patricia and Don Edgar, is an enquiry into the reality of these middle years (which they define as fifty to seventy-five years old). It is also a polemic, arguing that this need not be a period of decline, but one of sustained richness in personal fulfilment and capacity to contribute to society. We need ‘a complete rethink about the nature of middle age’. What holds this generation back, they argue, is a combination of outdated social attitudes (not helped by mischievous media articles about ‘intergenerational war’) and policy blindness in government and institutions about the contribution older people can make to society.

This book came my way at the right moment. I read it in the week that the Royal Commission enumerated the fact that, so far, 4,444 individuals have brought cases of sexual abuse against Catholic institutions in Australia – a staggering number. I know of others who are still struggling to come forward and tell their story. The archbishop of Sydney described the response of church officialdom as ‘criminally negligent’. Yet, so far, not one bishop has been stood down. Indeed, the only Catholic bishop sacked in Australia of recent times, Toowoomba’s Bill Morris, was one of the few who did seem to handle these issues appropriately. There have been endless apologies and statements about needing to change the culture of the Catholic Church. But the culture is profoundly and self-destructively resistant to change. In the very week of much public hand wringing at the Royal Commission, I encountered two cases of ecclesiastical high-handedness and self-importance. Admittedly, both related to far more trivial issues than sexual abuse. But in both situations I was left in no doubt that the church functionary was a superior being and all others needed to know their place.

Opposite a handsome portrait of him by Louis Kahan, Bruce Grant introduces his memoir of a ‘life’s journey’ by proposing that it is also a biography of Australia, and promising to revisit that on the last page. There, he summarises the plots of ‘Love in the Asian Century’, his recent trilogy of e-books, in which affairs between older men and younger women, Australian and Asian, start with enthusiasm, but are doomed to fail. The metaphor for the relationship between Australia and Asia is overt.

Stories about Australians abroad on what Grant calls a ‘crusade,’ clashing with Asian cultures and identities, and having affairs that end unhappily, are themes that prevailed when he began writing his novel Cherry Bloom (1980). The eponymous young Australian wife of a stuffy British diplomat in Singapore wants ‘desperately to connect’. Knowing no Asian language or history, she finds an American lover and learns about life and ‘ancient Chinese wisdom’, but eventually leaves for home.

It is rare to read a memoir as joyfully insouciant about sex as Judith Buckrich’s The Political Is Personal. She describes the delicious state of discovering it, at seventeen, as ‘a sex haze’. At nineteen, she has an intense, dark-eyed boyfriend but is also sleeping with Morry, whose chief merit is his staying power in bed. ‘Once, to prove the point, he read a book while fucking me,’ she writes. ‘Somehow we both found this hilarious.’ A year later, when she is engaged to Charles, her friend David climbs into bed with them, ‘wearing a new pair of red flannel pyjamas that left a red stain forever on our sheets.’

Marriage is a far less pleasurable activity. She weds Charles, a handsome American, in April 1970, in Melbourne. By October they have split up. Her second marriage in 1988, to a Hungarian social worker, has the air of a train wreck before the vows are exchanged. ‘As the date of our wedding drew closer,’ she confides, ‘I really wondered if I had lost my mind.’ It happens anyway and Buckrich falls pregnant. Later, she learns that while she was in hospital recovering from their daughter’s birth, her husband was sleeping with another woman.

In 2015, Nikki Gemmell’s mother, Elayn, took an overdose of painkillers. Gemmell’s new book, After, chronicles the difficult process of confronting her mother’s death and resolving the anguish it brought to her and her children. It is also an impassioned appeal for changes in Australia’s laws on the right to die.

The youthful genre of popular neuroscience enjoys a few advantages that popular psychology, its older sibling, does not. The general public holds neuroscience in higher esteem, more confident in its scientific legitimacy. The concreteness of brain science – its colourful scans, its focus on a kilogram or so of custardy matter rather than a weightless cloud of mind – gives it a solidity that psychology tends to lack. Crucially, aspiring popularisers of neuroscience do not need to worry about common sense, because the public has few intuitions about how the brain works. Popular psychologists have a tougher assignment. If they violate common sense about mind and behaviour they are disbelieved, but if they uphold it what do they have to offer that a sage grandmother does not?

As science writing goes, then, popular neuroscience has something of a head start. It can tackle the most intriguing questions of experience and behaviour, strike a confident pose of scientific rigour, and expect a level of credulity from non-specialist readers. Its technical language seduces us into belief. How much more impressive it sounds to ascribe a change in behaviour to ‘neural plasticity’ rather than to ‘learning’, although the two concepts are effectively synonymous.

The relationship between science and power is central to many struggles of the present. Politics impinges on science when funding is allocated to ‘applied’ or ‘fundamental’ research, when decisions are reached about what should be taught in schools, when governments determine if people can be forced to vaccinate their children, what kinds of interventions into reproduction are allowable, or if we should accept the consensus view of climate scientists about the effects of fossil fuel consumption. The Soviet Union provides a particularly intriguing case study. A state with a large scientific establishment, it was ruled by a party which itself claimed a ‘scientific worldview’: Marxism–Leninism. Stalin was hailed as a ‘corypheus of science’ with a far-ranging mandate to set the agenda.

Under such leadership the politics of science moved between two extremes. On the one end was evolutionary biology, which was taken over by a crank with excellent political skills: T.D. Lysenko. He managed to convince the dictator that his odd concoction of Lamarckism (the theory that acquired characteristics could be passed on), half-understood Darwinism, peasant wisdom, and Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism was more ‘materialist’ and therefore more ‘true’ than the ‘idealist’ and maybe even ‘fascist’ theories of modern genetics. The victory of this pseudo-science in 1948 wreaked havoc on Soviet biology in a field which turned out to be one of the sciences of the future. This story has been covered by a large number of studies, beginning with Zhores Medvedev’s dissident The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko, smuggled abroad and published in English in 1969. Other classics include David Joravsky’s The Lysenko Affair (1970) and Loren Graham’s Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (1972). Graham returned to the topic in Lysenko’s Ghost (2016), conclusively debunking the notion that Lysenkoism might have been a precursor of epigenetics.

Chester Wilmot was blessed with the professional reporter’s principal virtues, talent, self-confidence, resilience, and luck. While his skills as a broadcaster took him to the various fronts of World War II, it was luck, as much as planning, that put him in Tobruk, Greece, and on the Kokoda Track at the precise moments to witness Australia’s armed forces in their first critical tests of the war. Yet if luck played its part in gifting him proximity to the action, it was his artistry, his ability to inform and enthral his listeners, to bring them to the ‘tip of the spear’, that transformed his accounts of, respectively, a siege, a rout, and a fighting withdrawal into epic adventures of the nation at war. When, at General Thomas Blamey’s insistence, Wilmot was stripped of his accreditation and sent home from New Guinea in November 1943, he turned this personal and professional crisis into a triumph, resurrecting his career in London where he reported on the fighting in Europe for the BBC’s nightly War Report.

Here he earned lasting fame with memorable broadcasts from, among other places, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, recorded in a glider ferrying combat troops across the Channel; the liberation of Brussels; Operation Market Garden (with its bridge too far at Arnhem); the Battle of the Bulge; and the tent at Luneburg Heath when the German plenipotentiaries signed the surrender documents on 4 May 1945. On hand to record the great events in North Africa, New Guinea, and Europe, Wilmot in his books was among the first influential analysts of its battles, their strategies, and the men who fashioned and implemented them.

Robert Macklin is a great admirer of Hamilton Hume (1797–1873). He paints a vivid, scholarly picture of one of Australia’s lesser-known ‘currency’ explorers: a man who spent his youth hiking in the bush, with his brother and an Aboriginal guide, as often as his mother would allow. Hume was a successful farmer, able bushman and an expert on Aboriginal customs and languages. It was these skills that led to Hume’s being invited on expeditions to find arable land. These journeys were successful: land and water were found, and Hume’s teams returned alive and without the bloodshed which occurred in later expeditions, where the leaders lacked Hume’s linguistic skills and cultural understanding.

Which critics most impress you?

Some of Australia’s best writers are also reviewers. I always enjoy the beautifully crafted and perceptive work of Drusilla Modjeska, Mireille Juchau, James Bradley, Lisa Gorton, and Kerryn Goldsworthy, to name just a few. Anwen Crawford is wonderful on music, Kate Kellaway and a.j. carruthers on poetry. I love reading Virginia Woolf’s arch, sharp reviews. I miss Geordie Williamson’s acute reviews, though I’m very happy to see his talents applied to publishing.

What makes a fine critic?

I like J. Hillis Miller’s argument that the critic is both host and guest, and that the ‘reciprocal duties of hospitality’ frame a reading. To pursue the metaphor, I like it when both host and guest are attentive, hospitable, and courteous. I enjoy openness and curiosity in a review, and the pleasure of access to an intelligent encounter between reader and text. Reading reviews involves witnessing the charge and chemistry of that encounter (or, sometimes, the lack of those things). I also like the spark of an imaginative piece of writing.

Which poets have most influenced you?

In the 1980s I read Emily Dickinson’s poetry intensively, and I suspect that her superbly compressed work is ingrained within me. In late adolescence I loved the musicality of W.B. Yeats, and later I grew to admire W.H. Auden’s complexities and clarity. I dwelt for a while in the evocations of New Zealander Lauris Edmond. Recently, I have been reading the tensile work of Tusiata Avia with great enjoyment. Many Australian poets, including Judith Wright and Rosemary Dobson, have influenced my writing.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Poems are mainly the result of hard work and craft. Some poems seem to come easily, from who knows where, perhaps as a form of inspiration. If there are gods of poetry, I am happy to pay homage to them in this painfully materialistic age.

What prompts a new poem?

My poems are often prompted by a rhythm, a phrase, a word, a feeling, an intuition, or something I’ve read.

Why do you write?

It’s a hopeful or optimistic thing, I think, to try to catch bits of life, large or small, and explore them, understand them, then offer them up to readers who might also connect with them or for whom they might make sense.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

At the beginning and end of projects. In the middle I tend towards either the insomniac or the comatose.

Where are you happiest?

On a beach staring at a horizon – which might be my topographical equivalent to a blank page.

From the Wreck is a deeply ecological novel. It isn’t quite cli-fi – that new genre of fiction concerned with dramatising the effects of our changing climate on people and the world – rather, it is underpinned by an awareness of the connectedness of creatures: animal, human, and otherworldly alike, and narrated in parts by a creature who has fled another planet, ruined by invaders who ‘built machines, giant, and chemical plants’ and poisoned the oceanic habitat of this character and her kind.

The main protagonist is human: George Hills, a ship’s steward who survives the sinking of the steamship Admella off the South Australian coast. This much is drawn from history – Rawson is a descendant of Hills, who survived the 1859 shipwreck – but what saves George in this novel is the intervention of Bridget Ledwith, a strange, tentacled, shape-shifting creature who has assumed the form of a female passenger on the ship.

Domestic violence is an everyday reality for tens of thousands of women in Australia. Recent horrors and public campaigns have raised awareness of this social scourge. Journalists have written extensively on the subject, yet it is novelists, as Michael Sala shows in The Restorer, that can give us a more acute view of the emotional complexities that bind couples and keep women in threatening domestic situations.

The Restorer begins with Richard sitting outside his front door. A car towing a trailer laden with household goods pulls up outside the dilapidated property next door. Richard observes the new arrivals: a hesitant, slightly built woman; a gruff and muscular man; an awkward teenage girl; a boy kicking a discarded can. ‘Welcome to Newcastle,’ Richard says, only to be greeted with a stare, which causes ‘a prickling unease that reminded him of being singled out at school’.

This is one of two parenthetical chapters told from Richard’s perspective. The others alternate between the mother, Maryanne, and her fourteen-year-old daughter, Freya. The first chapter establishes the outsider’s point of view: that of the reader observing and judging, though powerless to intervene. We are not so much in the heads of Maryanne or Freya as looking over their shoulders, wanting to grab them and drag them from harm’s way.

There is a moment in ‘The Skit’ – the second in a collection of sixteen short stories by Indian-Australian author Roanna Gonsalves – when the writer protagonist, upon reading her work to a group of her peers (‘the Bombay gang’, as she describes them, ‘still on student visas, still drinking out of second-hand glasses from Vinnies, and eating off melamine plates while waiting and waiting for their applications for permanent residency to be processed’), is met with the incorrect assumption that her writing is autobiographical. This early on in The Permanent Resident – Gonsalves’s début book, though by no means her first reflection on migrant identities in Australia – it feels like a surreptitious wink from the author, whose voice hums sotto voce beneath a chorus of characters seldom represented (at least not so intricately) in twenty-first century Australian literature.

An epigraph from Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected lectures (2012) sets the tone of Libby Angel’s novel, The Trapeze Act ‘what is the moment but a fragment of greater time?’ This book is composed of fragments, which, taken together, capture the desire for a complete understanding of history and the impossibility of satisfying that desire.

A well-written and entertaining début, The Trapeze Act is narrated by Loretta Lord and set in an unnamed southern Australian city – one proud of its free-settler establishment and, by the late 1960s, home to the highest murder rate in the country. The novel moves across time and space, shifting between Loretta’s memories of her trapeze- artist mother, with her exuberant accounts of the Dutch Rodzirkus; her barrister father and the notorious murder cases by which he made his fame and fortune; and the found stories of her great-great-great-grandparents, who in 1858 emigrated to the colonies in search of elephants and their ivory.

The Silent Invasion, James Bradley’s first Young Adult novel and the first in a trilogy, begins in generic post-apocalyptic fashion. Humanity crowds into restricted safe zones, hiding from an intergalactic plague that infects living matter with the mysterious Change. Adolescent protagonist Callie’s younger sister Gracie is infected; to prevent her demise at the hands of Quarantine, Callie flees with her sister to the Zone, an area beyond Quarantine’s control in Australia’s far north that is overrun with Changed flora and fauna.

Mary Beard’s new history of Rome, reviewed here in March 2016, ended at the point where Edward Gibbon began his great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in what he called the happy age of the Antonines. That is also where Michael Kulikowski takes up the story in this book, the first of two intended volumes, although, as he admits, he will not follow Gibbon all the way to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the second Rome, in 1453.

Kulikowski demonstrates impressive mastery of a vast and complex field, made more complicated by the chronic tendency of leading Romans to change their names for various political reasons, and the surprising lack of reliable historical texts from this period. Names, outlines of biography, and some events may be recorded in inscriptions, but numismatics is a particularly precious resource: thus coins recording a claim to imperial status are confirmations, and sometimes the only evidence, of attempts at usurpation.

Even the happy second century, as Kulikowski shows, was far from perfectly serene. The Empire had by now reached its greatest extent, but its many borders required permanent vigilance. No state had ever had a more efficient system of command and communication or such a highly organised military to maintain peace and order: and not only in the Antonine period, but for centuries afterwards, Rome did generally guarantee the security of its subject populations.

Kenneth Clark had a life like no other art historian or critic, gallery director, arts administrator, patron, collector, or presenter on television. Whatever he touched, he left a sheen of brilliance. He was handsome, charming, and debonair. And he was rich, spending his last three decades as the lord of Saltwood Castle. His father, the raffish and boozy Kenneth McKenzie Clark, had made a fortune in cotton reels. K., as Clark was universally known to friends and acquaintances, was an only child. He was witty and self-deprecatory. Who can forget the opening of his autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974)?: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”...in that golden age many people were richer, there can be few who were idler.’ The reverse was true of K. He worked incessantly in all his nine lives. The great merit of James Stourton’s new biography, quite the best account we have ever had, is that he provides a detailed picture of each phase.

Born in 1903, mercifully too young for the Great War, K. went up to Oxford in the early 1920s and belonged to a glittering generation which included Evelyn Waugh, Cyril Connolly, and the chilly Anthony Powell, who thought Clark ‘ruthless’ in his social ambitions. Two Oxford grandees, John Sparrow and Maurice Bowra, Wardens of All Souls and Wadham respectively, would become lifetime friends. Bowra spent every Christmas with K. and his glamorous if dipsomaniac wife, Jane. K. would complain that ‘Maurice just wants to talk – 16 hours at a stretch’.

The eminent French historian Annette Wieviorka, in The Era of the Witness (1998, English version in 2006), analyses the difficulties arising, in writing historical narratives about recent times, from the exponential growth in the number of people wanting their stories to be heard. Wieviorka, whose field of specialisation is the Shoah, traces the trend of what she calls the ‘democratisation’ of history back to the Eichmann trial of 1960, following it through other celebrated war crimes trials such as those of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon. Her historiographical point is that, while eyewitness testimony is crucially valuable, it poses inevitable and serious problems in terms of its historical reliability; and when it reaches the volume represented by, say, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archives or the Spielberg Visual History Archives, the task of any single historian mastering the accumulated data becomes simply impossible.

Anne Sebba, in this book whose title pushes every button a literary publicist could possibly desire, has not, despite her own historical training, taken these issues into account. The result is an untidy, frustrating mixture of historical surfing, thoughtfully recounted and pertinent stories, and journalistic gossip. There can be no doubting the author’s passion, nor the work that she has devoted to her project. She draws on a huge range of sources. There are reputable existing historical accounts, including that of Hanna Diamond, whose Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and constraints (1999) has very much the same perspective and time frame as Sebba’s. There are diaries, letters, memoirs, newspaper reports, internet sites, interviews conducted by the author, and, more rarely, actual archival materials. Such variety is not in itself a problem: what is missing is the critical distance and the careful cross-checking necessary to mould such materials into a consistent, historically convincing overview.

The need for this book is self-evident in a way that a similarly historical anthology for New South Wales or Victorian poetry would not be. From many perspectives, Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world and there is no doubt that the state’s uniqueness is captured in this extensive, though tightly edited, selection. Despite its comparable treatment of Aboriginal people, Western Australia’s nineteenth-century history (with its brief experience of convictism and its relatively late gold rush in the 1890s) is different from that of the eastern colonies, about which Western Australians continue to feel a mild, justified paranoia.

Of course, Western Australia occupies about half the Australian continent, so there is also considerable regionality (likewise reflected in the selections here). John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan’s introduction to all this is suitably comprehensive and informative (if, occasionally, a little dramatic in its claims for the international status of some its poets).

Rhymed verse is a wide net
Through which many subtleties escape.
Nor would I take it to capture a strong thing
Such as a whale.

This manifesto for free verse comes from a poet whose associates at the time included Harold Monro, Richard Aldington, and D.H. Lawrence in London, Harriet Monroe and Louis Untermeyer in New York, Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris. Anna Wickham (1883–1947) mixed with the modernist writers and artists of her time on both sides of the Atlantic and was widely admired for her early books, The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with a Hammer (1916), and The Little Old House (1921).

Yet subtleties were not her strong point, and she often fell back on rhymed verse to make the challenging feminist statements for which she is best known, ‘strong things’ such as: ‘I married a man of the Croydon class / When I was twenty-two / And I vex him, and he bores me / Till we don’t know what to do!’ and, indeed, for her signature poem, ‘Note on Method’: ‘Here is no sacrificial I, / Here are more I’s than yet were in one human, / Here I reveal our common mystery: / I give you woman. / Let it be so for our old world’s relief / I give you woman, and my method’s brief.’

Although easy to miss amid the commotion of Brexit, Britain’s Human Rights Act (1998) is locked in a fight for its life. Besieged by a hostile press and beholden to a government that has pledged its repeal and replacement, its days are almost certainly numbered. It is against this fraught backdrop that Conor Gearty’s On Fantasy Island: Britain, Europe and human rights comes to the Act’s defence. In a spirited and wide-ranging rejoinder to its critics, Gearty restates the case for the Human Rights Act and explodes the myths that have fuelled its unpopularity.

Exploded too are the stifling conventions of legal writing. In opening with a clear-eyed account of the injustices sanctioned by the courts prior to the Human Rights Act, Gearty takes aim against a lecture delivered by John Finnis, emeritus professor at the University of Oxford and one of the storied eminences of modern jurisprudence. Gearty’s gently irreverent treatment of Finnis sets the tone for what is an energetic, conversational foray into law and politics, unmarked by the heavy-handed deference to which lawyers are too often prone.