Listen to this essay read by the author.

‘There are no words that fit tragedy. Nothing we can say. We do not want to be told everything is all right. It is not.’

Patrick Holland, ‘Silent Plains’ (2014)

‘Its constituents are – everything.’

Victor Hugo, Toilers of the Sea (1866)

It is quiet and cool and dark blue. At this depth the pressure on my body is double what it is at the surface: my heartbeat has slowed, blood has started to withdraw from my extremities and move into the space my compressed lungs have created. I am ten metres underwater on a breath-hold dive, suspended at the point of neutral buoyancy where the weight of the water above cancels my body’s natural flotation. I turn head down, straighten my body, kick gently, and begin to fall with the unimpeded gravitational pull to the heart of the Earth.

Freediving, or breath-hold diving, forms at once a commonplace and unique relationship between humans and oceans. Commonplace because we can do it from the moment we are born (having already floated in amniotic fluid for nine months), and because many native and local cultures in coastal areas around the world have long practised breath-hold diving. But also unique because ‘extreme sport’ competitive divers are now exceeding depths of two hundred metres on a single breath, and there are divers able to hold their breath underwater for more than eleven minutes. Freediving is both liminal and transgressive, taking place in a zone where few humans venture, and subverting norms about perceived natural boundaries. The practice of freediving mobilises what has been called the most powerful autonomic reflex known in the human body: the mammalian dive response.

While I have been a casual spearfisher for many years, I have only recently engaged with freediving in its contemporary expression. My first time freediving, I trained with divers from a centre in Bali. A small group of us spent the mornings alternating between dive theory and yoga practice, and the afternoons diving and talking. My instructors were Matt and Patrick, and my diving partner was Yvonne, young, German-born, with degrees in journalism and American Studies, and working locally as a scuba instructor. She had clearly spent a lot of time in the ocean, whereas for me it was never a profession or even an intense hobby.

On the north-east coast of Bali, Jemeluk Bay is wide and peaceful, sheltered from prevailing weather patterns, and lined with small fishing villages. The volcano Gunung Agung, the most sacred mountain in Bali, rises above the bay. The bathymetric chart highlights the continuity of the volcano’s slope deep into the ocean, depth falling away quickly from shore. We dive amongst the moored fishing boats, using a system of buoys and weights to establish guide lines into the depths. In the water, with one hand loosely on the line to keep myself oriented, I ‘breathe-up’, building the oxygen stores in my body. Visibility is about ten metres, then light disappears into milky blue darkness as I turn and dive. The white guide rope drifts past my mask until I reach the depth plate and pause, consciously relaxing my body, emptying my mind. I watch this world, bubbles float slowly upwards, jellyfish drift past, the sun is a diffuse white ball on the surface. It is distinctly different – thicker, darker, slower, heavier, more silent, and here I do not breathe.

Gunung Agung, Bali, Indonesia (photograph by Michael Adams)

As I fin back up, there is a burst of flickering light as a shoal of tiny blue fish hurtle through sunbeams at the surface. Head above water, there are distant sounds of the ubiquitous Balinese cocks, faint sounds from motor scooters. Diving again, my hearing transitions from airborne sound to waterborne sound. There is an intense crackle of snapping shrimp, fading as I go deeper. Faint sounds of women singing and the thrum of an outboard motor indicate a fishing boat passing nearby. After a few dives I start to close my eyes, removing the usual visual dominance to instead just listen and feel.

Two key aspects in freediving are equalisation, adjusting the pressure inside your ears to compensate for the increased pressure outside the eardrum that the water exerts with increasing depth; and responding to the ‘urge to breathe’, your body telling you insistently that you should breathe again, very soon, followed by involuntary spasms of your diaphragm, trying to make you breathe. Yvonne and I were both good at dealing with the urge to breathe, but we were not successfully equalising, and repeatedly had to turn back at ten metres, unable to eliminate the pain in our ears. I found this incredibly frustrating, and my diving ability declined as I became more tired and tense. Equalising is psychological as well as physical – taking down the walls of protection is difficult.

After the second day, I am completely spaced out, floating, serene. I sleep lightly through the tropical nights, dreaming of the dives, the patterns of light, the flicker of fish, the still blue. And I don’t really understand it: why does the mortal uncertainty of deep immersion feel nurturing, reassuring? When you are deep underwater on a breath-hold dive, the margin of safety can be very small, there is very little space between living and not: you are, both metaphorically and actually, quite close to death. I am old enough now that death is not an abstract proposition, I go to more funerals, and my near-adult children remind me of the place of death in my own childhood.

What presents itself to navigate this mortal, radical, uncertainty is grace. Physical grace means ease or suppleness of movement or bearing. It is a by-product of good freediving: the equalising of pressure across your eardrums and between your lungs and the crushing ocean weight, the streamlining of the external position and shape of your body. It is achieved by aligning yourself to the enveloping, immersive environment, the context and emotion of the place and time. Grace is important. We intuitively respond positively to seeing it in others (dancers, gymnasts, athletes) because it is good for us – to gracefully align ourselves to our environment. Physical grace is coupled with spiritual grace – it regenerates and sanctifies, and gives strength to endure trials. When you stop breathing, it’s good to stop thinking too.

Uncontrolled fear when deep underwater will spike adrenalin, trigger the flight or fight responses, and potentially kill you. You can’t fight and you can’t flee, you have to accept and relinquish all control, you have to trust: the crushing pressure of multiple atmospheres cocoons you in an embrace.

In practice, freediving is just holding your breath and diving underwater. It is as old as humans, and humans have long understood various aspects of how it is possible, but the knowledge is uneven. Bajau divers from the Philippines and Malaysia routinely suffer hearing loss through burst eardrums, and Greek sponge divers in the past often had significant hearing loss as well as symptoms of decompression illness. The women-only diving communities of Ama in Japan and Haenyno in Korea appear to dive deep long into old age with no ill effects, and have done so for thousands of years. Western spearfishers tend to know about equalising, but not so much about oxygen and carbon dioxide processes in the body.

Contemporary research interprets the physiology of freediving through the concept of the ‘mammalian diving response’. This is a combination of three independent reflexes that counter the normal bodily regulation of breathing, heart rate, and blood pressure, and it is described as the strongest unconscious reflex in the body. The diving response occurs in all mammals, and possibly in all vertebrates – it has been observed in every air-breathing vertebrate ever tested. It is obvious and prominent in human infants. Up to about six months an infant immersed in water will open her eyes, hold her breath, slow her heartbeat, and begin to swim breaststroke.

It is currently assumed that there are three triggers for the diving response: facial immersion, rising carbon dioxide levels, and increasing pressure at depth. These triggers result in reduced heart rate, redistribution of blood from bodily extremities to central organs, and contraction of the spleen. All these reflexes increase access to oxygen, either by reducing the rate it is consumed, or by changing its availability in the body. Learning to understand and recruit these processes enables freedivers to routinely reach depths of twenty to fifty metres, and to set records at depths of one hundred to two hundred metres.

From the land or the air, the ocean surface is opaque, mobile, vast, and dark. The World Ocean is animate, active, unstable, ungrounded, unfathomed. It covers seventy per cent of the planet’s surface and encompasses ninety-nine per cent of its inhabitable area. It is largely unknown. Ocean processes control the weather and continental climates. It defines the Blue Planet.

Once immersed, beneath that surface, the suck and swell of the tides feel like the planet breathing. We are surprised, sometimes anxious and then increasingly comfortable with the complexities of temperature and movement in the ocean. There are layers of warm and cold water; strong but invisible currents that can help or hinder us; be struggled against or relaxed into, rocking the body into peace. Our bodies begin to align with those rhythms: the cycle of the moon and the ebb and flow of tides, the fetch of the wind across the bay.

Mirroring our time in the tiny sea of the amniotic sac, freediving is the most profound engagement between humans and oceans: the unmediated body immersed and uncontrolled in saltwater. It is simultaneously planetary and intensely intimate – the ocean is both all around us and within us. That breadth of scale can be terrifying or reassuring. It is not about discovery, it is about recovery: we can freedive expertly from the minute we are born, but slowly forget. Our cultural preoccupation with growth and exploration washes away our embodied knowledge. Aboriginal people in Australia speak of how, if the Country is there, the knowledge is always there, and remind us to draw on the whole of the evidentiary base: the world, physical sensations, dreams, emotions – not just the ‘bedrock’ of Western reason. Sea Country keeps its knowledge too, waiting for us to find it again.

Ten metres, thirty feet, the point of neutral buoyancy, is five fathoms in the old marine depth measure, as in Ariel’s song:

Full fathom five thy father lies,
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Fathom comes from the ancient word fæthm meaning an arm span, ‘something that embraces’. It also means ‘to understand’ – to get to the bottom of something. I didn’t start freediving to understand mortality, but that is the direction in which it has led me. Diving is the window that, for Simone Weil, ‘makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment’. Herman Melville puts the same thought into the whaleboat, ‘it is only when caught in the swift, sudden turn of death, that mortals realize the silent, subtle, ever-present perils of life’.

Although he died when I was fourteen, I saw my father’s death certificate for the first time this year. Single word entries sketched the story: at age forty-five he was living in a caravan in north Queensland, working menial jobs. He sat down alone one evening on a beach with a handful of pills and a bottle of scotch to kill himself. He asphyxiated on his vomit and was found days later. Four brief entries on a faded government form, with a tsunami of hurt and loss behind them, and a flood of confusion and misunderstanding to come. I knew the basics of that story, but was not prepared for the shock of the typed words: ‘labourer’, ‘caravan park’, ‘suffocation’.

Reading a stranger’s words on my father’s death certificate reminds me how little I know about him. Because of some medical training before dropping out of university, he had good knowledge of pharmaceuticals. This helped him to find work with large pharmaceutical companies and gave him access to prescription drugs from the warehouse. I remember as a boy scavenging through boxes in those warehouses and using surgical tape to construct murderous crossbows with back-to-back scalpel blades as arrowheads. We moved around a lot as he and my mother held a number of jobs. My mother left when I was eleven, and I last saw my father when I was thirteen. My brother and I had lived in ten houses in five towns by the time I finished school.

My relationship with my own son through his mid-teens was fraught. My teenage years had been marked by binge drinking, drugs, and other risk-taking, but I rationalised that I was responding to a dysfunctional childhood, whereas he had two loving and supportive parents present, material security, and we lived in a beautiful place. I felt I had no road map and was just making it up as I went along. I had a stepfather in my own teens who took me into police cells and stood me in front of mangled cars with blood pooled beneath them to show me where I was going to wind up. I now wonder whether suggesting to my son that we go to a freedive school was pushing against, or mirroring, the patterns of my own past.

I have spearfished with him since he was less than ten years old, but in relatively shallow waters. One of the first times, as he stood next to me on the rocks above rolling swells, I asked him if he was ready, to which he said, ‘If being totally terrified is ready, then yes I am’ – and we stepped off into the sea. He is a long way past that now and far outstrips me in his ability and comfort in the water. During our first session in Bali, I watch his grace and skill as he fins down the line and disappears into blue depth past the limit of visibility. Then a long wait until he reappears, relaxed and unhurried. He interned at the freedive school, and has now repeatedly dived thirty and forty metres. On his first attempt at that depth, he paused at the depth marker and looked back to the surface. Freedive teachers tell you to not look up or down, to keep your spine straight, and five atmospheres of pressure ruptured blood vessels in his extended trachea so by the time he was back at the surface he was coughing blood.

Divers like to underplay these injuries, so it is called a ‘throat squeeze’. You can also have an eye or mask squeeze or lung squeeze. The medical literature defines these as barotraumas, pressure-induced injuries; they can be very common in freediving. You can also ‘samba’ at the surface (a loss of motor control so your body does a little involuntary dance) and finally ‘SWB’, shallow water blackout: both of these are a result of hypoxia or oxygen deficiency in the brain. It is increasingly assumed that shallow water blackout is the explanation for many diving deaths generally attributed to drowning. Shallow water blackout is achieved by either consciously enduring the contractions of your diaphragm (caused by increasing carbon dioxide levels) that are trying to force you to breathe; or artificially lowering those carbon dioxide levels with particular breathing practices, so you don’t get the contractions.

After my first freedive trip, I went back to riding a big motorbike and started yoga. The freediving, yoga, and motorbike are related practices. Yoga is not intrinsically dangerous, but yoga philosophy says ‘when you hold your breath you hold your soul’. Breathing out, expiration, is a little reflection of that last gasp of death; to expire means both to breathe out and also to die. The physical movements and breathing practices of yoga take me to a place of emptiness and peace: when the breath is still, the mind is still. The BMW demands presence: it is really not good to daydream on a motorbike. I ride nearly every day, in all weather, and statistically that will likely eventually lead to an incident. But when that happens, adrenalin and reflexes come to the rescue. Diving and yoga remove adrenalin and bring quiet and stillness; the motorbike and diving bring presence in danger.

Bruny coast (photograph by Michael Adams)

One winter I dived off South Bruny Island, Tasmania. Bruny was home to Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganini. During my school years we were told Truganini was the ‘last of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people’, effectively erasing the lives of the many descendants of Aboriginal people and various settler–colonist communities. I harvested from the ancestral waters of Truganini’s Neunone people: cold, deep water, rich and beautiful: abalone, oysters, mussels, edible seaweeds, wild spinach. The abalone industry is worth $100 million a year but excludes many Aboriginal people because of the exorbitant cost of licences, despite a 40,000-year history of sustainable harvest demonstrated by numerous shell middens. Current active divers are arguing that the stock is on the verge of collapse after only four decades of over-intensive harvest.

Walking the tidal edge on Bruny, I kept thinking about Joseph Conrad’s words at the end of Heart of Darkness (1899): ‘the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky – seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness’. Tasmania is not so far from the uttermost ends of the earth, and it has a dark history, palpable in the landscape. The idea of ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ is not new, with writers Richard Flanagan, Rohan Wilson, and others exploring the psyche of the Van Diemonians. Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011) is perhaps the most successful book I have read in presenting how Aboriginal people, in all their diversity, were totally compromised by the violent colonial process: there were no right decisions to be made, especially in Tasmania: all decisions had terrible consequences. (After leaving Bruny I discover, astonishingly, that the rusting hulk of the Otago, the only ship that Joseph Conrad commanded, lies near the shore of the Derwent River in Hobart.)

My first attempt diving at Bruny was short. It was morning, mid-winter, calm, and I had just seen a trio of dolphins cruising slowly along the shore of the D’Entrecasteaux Channel. I slipped into deep water from a boat jetty and was immediately shocked by the intense cold, less than ten degrees by my dive watch. I submerged and finned west across the channel towards Satellite Island, but with visibility only two to three metres, an instant cold headache and paranoia about hypothermia, I opted out.

The second try was at Cloudy Bay, also very cold but I dived for forty-five minutes. Visibility was still limited, and big swells rolling unimpeded from Antarctica meant I could not get near to the underwater bull kelp forests, which seem to like high-energy coasts. Black cockatoos and a pair of sea eagles watched while I dressed, shaking with cold, on the rain-soaked beach.

Before Tasmania, I dived at Honaunau Bay on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. Like Jemeluk Bay, this coast is dominated by the volcano Mauna Kea – to Native Hawaiians the most sacred mountain in Hawai‘i, and the tallest mountain in the world if measured from the sea floor. The first day I am just testing my gear. This is my first time diving since I scuba-dived with students on a field course. I have heard someone compare scuba diving to driving though a forest in a four wheel drive with the windows up and the air conditioning on – and that was definitely my experience – I kept wanting to stop breathing to cut out all that noise, all those bubbles, to reject the cyborg and hybrid paraphernalia. Diving at Honaunau Bay was the opposite – serenely quiet except for the crackle of shrimp and the slap of waves.

I am diving with Daniel, an instructor from southern California who has relocated to the Big Island. Daniel is very experienced and very, very relaxed in the water. Again like Jemeluk, Honaunau Bay is unique in having great depth close to shore: the bathymetric chart here shows that within a hundred metres of shore you can be in a hundred metres depth of water. I have never been in water that deep; on the first day I have trouble relaxing with all that blue falling away below my fins. Being relaxed is really important in free diving – I wind up with continuous cramps in both legs.

On my third day diving we are joined by Shell, a quietly-spoken instructor and international competitor. A month after we dived together, Shell became the US women’s champion in the pool discipline of ‘dynamic no-fins’, swimming 125 metres underwater without breathing in less than three minutes. Diving with Daniel and Shell was calm but rigorous, with detailed safety processes and checks. Shell was quietly experimenting with a nose clip and no mask, and Daniel was safety diver for us both as we alternated dives.

A year later, I dive in a very different way at Honaunau Bay, this time with legendary diver Carlos Eyles. All my diving so far had been within the established structures of modern freediving, with guide ropes, floats, marker plates, and lots of focus on metres of depth, minutes of breath-hold, Boyle’s law, and the physics and physiology of pressure. Of all the people I have dived with, two gave me stark lessons about my own attachment to this linear thinking. Rayanna, a young Brazilian woman I dived with in Indonesia, and an excellent freediver, never used a dive watch, did not measure her depth or breath-hold, and helped me throw away the numbers. In Hawai‘i, Carlos, who is seventy-five, did not talk about technique at all: we sat at the edge of the water and talked about philosophy for an hour before our dives together, then he taught experientially – I copied his movements. He called it ‘catching the rock’, demonstrating the analogy that we cannot teach through linear thinking or communication how to catch a thrown object, our brains can’t compute the distances and movements and decisions, we learn it bodily. We dived for an hour or so, then swam together for about a mile, out to the northern point of Honaunau Bay and back. Next day I went back and repeated it all, but this time alone, breaking the cardinal rule of modern freediving.

Michael Adams, Honaunau Bay, Hawai'i (Photograph by Daniel Koval)

The core and obvious lesson for me from Carlos was ‘the ocean is not a linear system’. Non-linear systems are typically described as counter-intuitive, unpredictable, or chaotic. We can think of the ocean like this, as vast, turbulent, shifting, untamed, unknowable – the dark abyss. Floating above one hundred metres of blue depth, that abyss felt very real. As Carlos says, soon sharks will start circling in your pre-frontal lobes: they are just out of sight, but you are sure they are there. Carlos talked about this fear, and how you had to throw away these acculturated imaginings, these death anxieties, and focus on your body’s ancient knowledge. When the fear is there, those monsters of the deep, you lose grace. Finding grace opens you to transformation. Feeling the ocean all the way through your body, seeing it in every direction you can look, experiencing sound and silence and light transformed by the depth and thickness of water – these embodied experiences unground our linear, rational, bounded structures of thought. We can let go of the anchor of imagined and irrational fears, and swim free with humility and attention. Swimming and diving alone on a quiet hot morning in Honaunau Bay, feeling strong and comfortable in my body, I am slowly unmoored, slowly floating away from risk assessments and calculations and into the warm embrace of the peaceful bay.

This ocean, these waters, are full of life and agency. Most of life lives in the sea – fifty to eighty per cent of all species live there. Their agency is palpable – their intention, attention, awareness, and presence in the rock, coral, sand, and saltwater. So while I was alone, I was also not alone, I was surrounded by innumerable other beings, all going on with their lives and deaths in the sea about me.

In the tidal wave of current discussions about extinctions, biodiversity loss, and planetary crisis, a less visible current of knowledge pulls at our attention. Everywhere, there is both abundance and loss, thriving and declining. What we term weeds, or feral species, or invasive species, or common and abundant species, are plants and animals thriving in place, and it happens everywhere. In all the world’s oceans, while many apex predators are depleted, populations of cephalopods (squid, cuttlefish, and octopus) are increasing, despite continuous and heavy fishing. Cephalopods are particularly interesting, with complex intelligences described by Peter Godfrey-Smith in 2016 as ‘an independent experiment in the evolution of a large nervous system, the only such experiment outside the vertebrates’. In my local seas, octopus and giant cuttlefish are quite common, often curiously investigating us as we examine them. My local rocky shores are also home to the only cephalopod that can kill a human, the tiny and potently venomous blue-ringed octopus. Hundreds of human families play in that habitat daily with no fatal encounters; we peacefully share the space. Because we have forgotten this truth, that we can share, that we are all connected, planet and landscape and seascape and human and innumerable other species, we have lost perspective on change, and these become liminal experiences: looking into the large, thinking eyes of octopuses and giant cuttlefish; sinking into depth, eyes-closed, past the buoyancy zone; embodying the visceral sense of release and lightness of diving on empty lungs.

Liminality is a threshold state, the border between one condition and another. It is not either of them, it is ambiguous and disorienting. In many cultures, there are three stages in the liminal transition: a metaphorical death, a test, and rebirth. The liminality of freediving has multiple dimensions. It connects us to ancient stories in many cultures of mermen and mermaids: beings between human and water creature. Western cultures know them as sea-nymphs, nixies, silkies, etc. Miskito Indian divers in Central America call these beings liwa mairin, and in modern times attribute decompression sickness and other diving illnesses to the inimical moods of these water spirits. Diving is also in the boundary zone between earth and water, with air the defining element. It moves from light to increasing darkness with depth and back again. It moves from swimming down against the natural buoyancy of the human body, to free-falling with gravity as increasing water pressure overcomes that buoyancy.

And it is liminal between life and death – at great depth, you have to be exquisitely attuned to the totality of your body if you want to keep on living. You have to understand the symptoms of oxygen depletion in the particular way that it is expressed in your own body, and confidently know how much time you have to continue swimming deeper, as well as make the return journey to the surface before you black out. I keep in my journal a graph illustrating this relationship, with red and blue lines showing trajectories of living and dying. Free- divers I spoke with indicated there can be a wide range of physiological indications of oxygen depletion, and they had learnt quite specific cues to which they would respond. Despite this, many experienced freedivers assured me that death is seldom in their thoughts. The safety framing in recreational freedive training and diving is usually rigorous and very careful, with a number of key rules described as ‘safety through redundancy’, designed to keep divers well within the limits of what is safe for them individually. This is reinforced by the buddy system, so you never dive alone. Spearfishers, routinely self-taught, tend to be less particular in their approach, with hyperventilation often a common practice, and many spearfishers diving alone. Lifelong surfer and diver Tim Winton embodies this, with many lyrical passages in his writing reflecting the casual acceptance of these risks.

Moving away from the regulated structures of safety and risk control lead you onto the rocks of danger and uncertainty, and danger and uncertainty, normal in most of nature, are the complements of safety and fulfilment in life. To live amidst all of these you need to be present, attentive – you need to learn to fail better. Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chödrön argues that ‘all kinds of things happen that break your heart, but you can hold failure and loss as part of your human experience’. You need to find again your ancient bodily wisdom, your heart’s knowledge that while we are all alone, while there is always hurt and loss, your strength and beauty and intelligence and love are transmuted through your life’s relationships and work to be reborn in others.

(Photograph courtesy of Michael Adams)

I have failed to understand my father’s suicide all my life. There was no note, no message, I had not seen him for a year. Freediving has shown me a new way to understand death. In the yoga traditions, breathing in engulfs you with life. Breathing out generously gives that life back out into the world. After deep practice of yoga breath control, pranayama, the need to breathe often falls away for long, relaxed minutes. As the water closes over my head each time I dive, I let go my earthly concerns to sink into the blue embrace of an alternate world. On that dune in the tropical night, my father took a different measure on his life and cast off his quotidian moorings. One of those moorings was me, and I have to fathom the place in my life of both harbour and open sea, port and storm.

In freediving I often think about death, but it is not always ‘death anxiety’ as the psychologists construct it. There is real danger, as well as the imaginary circling sharks. In physiological terms, breath-hold diving is progressive asphyxiation. It is possible because of a profound suppression of metabolism: it changes the way your body functions. Surfacing after a prolonged dive, you are not the same person: your body has moved through dramatic changes, you have been to a place where few venture. If much life is lived on the surface of things, freediving lets you plunge beneath that surface. Freediving has led me to an understanding of the paradoxical joy of being close to death: the compassion and peace.

I have lived much of my life feeling marginal, feeling like an imposter in my jobs: I expect rejection, a predictable outcome of two parents sequentially leaving when I was young. Only recently have I begun to understand that there might be strengths in those places on the margin. Freediving alone, freediving actually free of all that positivist framing and safety paraphernalia and other people, brought me back to my father’s death. He had become more and more marginal to what the world considers important, and eventually, alone, stepped off that edge, stepped free of all that judgement and demand. There is no possibility of answers once that boundary is crossed. Alone, immersed in the spaces of the silent water, I am maybe learning to let go of the questions.

In blue water diving most life is not visible, for most large sea creatures live in shallower waters. In deep blue water the freediver is exposed in every direction, completely vulnerable. That vast continuous space, that absence, is an entry, an opening. Empty space is open to anyone, an invitation. Can I live without trying to fill the silences and empty spaces? Can I learn to live in these silences and spaces? In the extraordinary emptied bliss at the end of a yoga session, when my teachers cup their hands over my ears in the penultimate position of savasana (appropriately, the corpse pose), the muted roar of the ocean fills the silence: the tides of salt blood pulsing through my body. It feels like the hand of god.

One of my teachers in Bali urged us to swim on the shallow reef before the deep water, observing and learning local marine species and ecologies, as well as being in the sea generally: ‘you need to spend time in the ocean, make it your friend’.

Freedivers in Bali (photograph courtesy of Michael Adams)

We become familiar with one turtle that seems always to be found in the same patch of reef, we know the batfish are curious and often come to investigate us in the deep water, we begin to understand the diurnal patterns of changing activities and species across an undersea topography that becomes familiar. And fundamentally we engage with the saltwater itself: we taste it, swallow it, rinse it through our sinuses, feel it flow across our skin – it is both all around us and within us. The tears in our eyes, the sweat on our skin, the blood in our veins, arteries, organs, have the same salt concentration as ancient oceans, reflecting the time when the ocean water itself served as the fluid transport in the bodies of our biological ancestors.

Deep in the ocean’s embrace, on one breath, feeling your mind and body change, freediving is a transformational encounter. Like all of life, it is a journey between two breaths, the first breath of life and the last breath before death, the last breath before immersion and the first breath of surfacing again into air. In yoga and meditation, practitioners speak of ‘resting in the space between breaths’. In marine mammal physiology, researchers describe the way seals will drift underwater, not swimming, not breathing, not hunting – resting in the space between breaths. On this blue pathway, naked of technology, with just one breath, the freediver’s unshielded body is open to the silent sea. The transformative encounter connects the World Ocean to the ocean within, bringing us home to the cycles of how we are born and die alone and together on this planet.

Thanks to William Shakespeare, Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad, Simone Weil, Tim Winton, Nam Le, the octopus and seal researchers, my many teachers, my various first readers, my family, the Bundanon Trust, and all the humans and non-humans with whom we share the seas.

Michael Adams teaches and researches in Geography at the University of Wollongong, and before that worked for environment NGOs, the national parks service, and Aboriginal organisations. His focus is on human–nature relationships, especially with Indigenous and local communities, and he likes full-immersion methodologies. He writes in a variety of forms, including narrative non- fiction and peer-reviewed academic articles.

The Calibre Essay Prize, created in 2007, is Australia’s premier essay prize. Originally sponsored by Copyright Agency (through its Cultural Fund), Calibre is now funded by Australian Book Review. Here we gratefully acknowledge the generous support of ABR Patron and Chair, Mr Colin Golvan QC.

Arundhati Roy’s first and only other novel was The God of Small Things (1997). It attracted an advance of half a million pounds; publishing rights were sold in twenty-one countries; and it won the 1997 Booker Prize, as it was then called. Since then it has sold six million copies and has been translated into forty languages. In the interval, Roy has been prolific in her non-fiction and fearless in her political activism.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I had been a writer and editor at school and university, I’d worked in the Whitlam government, I’d been a freelance journalist, and I was interested in politics, history, books, and writing, so it was a natural progression – though I didn’t realise it at the time.

What was the first book you ever published?

A small book by an unknown author by the name of Henry Rosenbloom, titled Politics and the Media, in 1976.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Usually.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Around seventy.

Michelle Cahill and Amanda Joy have produced two engaging and proficient collections of poetry. In their different ways, each revels in worlds of perception, imagination, and poetic craft.

Amanda Joy’s first full-length collection, Snake Like Charms comes out of UWAP’s new poetry series and marks the emergence of an important voice in Australian poetry. In her work, Joy, who won the 2016 Peter Porter Poetry Prize for her poem ‘Tailings’, highlights an intensity of almost ecstatic perception. We see this perception ranging across the specificity of place, in particular West Australia, notions of myth, the intimacy of relationships with lovers, children, and, at the core, the relationship between the individual human and the natural world. These ideas are woven together through the trope of the snake – both as a recognition of the power of the external world and as part of an imaginative engagement with that world. The snake – creature and metaphor – can be part of an Australian ecosystem, beautiful, dangerous, even a mythic go-between the worlds of the spirit and the body. In the poem ‘Synecdoche’, Joy writes: ‘Can’t say – / poor snake / Your strangeness is maybe / what we can’t imagine / living without.’

What is Barack Obama’s legacy? That deceptively simple question forms the subject of Jonathan Chait’s new book, Audacity. Across seven disparate chapters, the book ‘makes the case that Obama succeeded’ – that he ‘accomplished nearly everything he set out to do, and he set out to do an enormous amount’.

‘Vietnam Vietnam Vietnam, we’ve all been there.’ The American reporter Michael Herr thus concluded his celebrated work Dispatches (1977), confident that his readers understood what he meant, even if most of them had never set foot in the country. The very word possessed an almost incantatory power. In the United States, as in Australia, opposition to the military intervention and its cross-fertilisation with other forms of dissent dominated the historical period. ‘Vietnam’ became an all-consuming cause célèbre as much as an actual geographical entity, ‘a war not a country’, in the revealing phrase used by Herr himself. Indicatively, Dispatches said plenty about the war’s traumatic effect on Americans, but very little about the Vietnamese themselves.

The vicariousness of ‘Vietnam’ is directly addressed by the Yale-based Australian scholar of Southeast Asia, Ben Kiernan, in the opening chapter of this major new history of the country. The use of diacritics in work’s title, Việt Nam, signals that Kiernan intends his work to be an act of precision and of reclamation. Multi-regional and polyethnic, Vietnam ‘has always been much more than a war’, he writes. A long, slender land of rivers framed by the Red River Delta in the north and that of the Mekong to the south, and bordered by the South China Sea, it is apprehended as a real landscape populated by real, if diverse, people. The place we now call Vietnam is ‘a land shared and contested by many peoples and cultures’ over three millennia, ‘a series of homelands that have become a shared territory’. Just as the country cannot be reduced to a single twentieth-century war, nor can its history be simply distilled into one national narrative.

Springtime allows Parisians to indulge their predilection for life en terrasse. Trees and gardens are blooming, neighbourhood markets and squares are coming alive, and the newly pedestrianised right bank of the Seine is busy with walkers and cyclists.

A rollerblading poet stopped to cadge some tobacco from a friend of mine as we were sitting outside a bar on rue de Belleville one afternoon. He asked us, ‘Vous allez voter pour qui, vous?’ – ‘Well, who are you voting for then?’ He proceeded to entertain us for fifteen minutes, often in rhyme, with a half-lucid, half-mad soliloquy about France’s political chaos. Later I met Sandrine, a neighbour on rue Ramponeau. Motorists were leaning on their horns as she slowly guided her dog to the pavement. Together we carried the arthritic creature (called Dog) back to Sandrine’s apartment. An anonymous soul relieved me of my wallet somewhere between the airport and Belleville. Other impressions from my first week back: the sheer filth and grime, the street kids, the contrast between the fifth and twentieth arrondissements, the tenderness, the harshness, the indifference.

Returning to the capital where I lived for two years during my undergraduate studies has brought a sense of fond familiarity and an awareness of some disheartening changes. Poverty and homelessness seem more acute, or at least more visible, exacerbated by the Syrian crisis and the arrival of so many refugees. One consequence is the feeling of powerlessness and apathy that seems to develop in tandem. A Parisian friend asked me what good her pity would do anyone.

There is a distinct poignancy attached to last things, a sense in which they encapsulate all that has gone before at the same time as they anticipate an end. In the moment of their first manifestation, last things are already haunted by their own absence. This Water: Five tales is the first book by Beverley Farmer to be published since 2005, and has been announced as her last work.

This Water inhabits the haunted – and haunting – regions between presence and absence, life and death, day and night, this world and its mirrored otherworld, the life of the body and the life of the mind. Rich in elemental metaphor, and literary and mythic echoes that will be familiar to readers of Farmer’s work, the book evolves via silken threads of association that link its five tales, weaving an intricate web at the heart of which lie ‘bonds of silence, absence and solitude’.

‘Ring of Gold’ is classic Farmer. It relates the solitary life of a woman who lives by The Rip, walks its tidal zone, and remembers her mother, her lost child, the books that are ‘too small to live in’ but that somehow make a world in the mind. Like all the tales in this book, ‘Ring of Gold’ borrows from myth, in this case the folktale of the Great Silkie, embodied in the figure of a bull seal who beaches himself and, before returning to the water, gives a silent roar, ‘a mute, a mutual scream of horrified recognition’. Here, Farmer introduces many of the images that are repeated throughout the book, and which gain power and meaning with each iteration: golden wedding bands, red silk, spider webs, pomegranates, ‘God’s curse on Eve’, metamorphosis, the underworld, and the elements of water, fire, stone, and ice.

'Our parents intimately link us, closeted as we are in our lives, to a thing we’re not, forging a joined separateness and a useful mystery, so that even together with them we are also alone,’ writes Richard Ford early in ‘My Mother, In Memory’, the first of the two memoirs that comprise Between Them, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s bewitching first book-length work of non-fiction.

Born fifteen years into his parents’ marriage, Ford was both a late and an only child. This instilled in him what he deems the ‘luxury’ of being able to ponder what came before, namely, as he writes, ‘the parents’ long life you had no part in’. In these recollections of Edna and Parker Ford’s lives as a couple and as parents, Ford consigns to the page a lifetime of such speculation. Over the years, he writes, ‘I’ve written down memories, disguised salient events into novels, told stories again and again to keep them within my reach.’ Now, Ford writes of his parents’ lives as a seasoned and master storyteller. Here we find a different side of the acclaimed novelist, one who delves into the mysteries of his family’s past.

In his Epilogue to this major study of the West Australian wheatbelt and its writers, Tony Hughes-d’Aeth describes his work. With no ‘exact precedent’ in Australian scholarship, it is ‘best thought of as an amalgam of literary history, literary sociology and literary geography’. To achieve this, Hughes-d’Aeth traces the idea of the wheatbelt through intensive readings of the work of eleven writers. In their writing it is a created place, ‘an entity sustained by human imagination’. The literature captures and records the changes, broadly environmental and social, that have impacted on it.

While the wheatbelt in Western Australia can be seen as part of an Australian and worldwide phenomenon, the advent of large-scale wheat farming in the nineteenth century, its characteristics are peculiarly its own. It covers an area close to the size of Britain, in the most ancient part of Australia, and exists on a largely waterless plain. Its limits are defined by rainfall patterns and its beginnings in the late nineteenth century were enabled by the gold boom in Western Australia. The discovery of gold brought people seeking a new future to the state, while access to superphosphate gave the land its potential fertility.

Calibre Essay Prize

The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its eleventh year, has played a major role in the resurgence of the literary essay. This year we received almost 200 essays from fourteen countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose – who judged the Prize with Sheila Fitzpatrick (award-winning historian and ABR and LRB regular) and Geordie Williamson (Picador Publisher and editor of The Best Australian Essays 2015 and 2016) – rated this year’s Calibre shortlist the finest he has considered.

Michael AdamsMichael Adams is the winner of the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize. His essay is entitled ‘Salt Blood’. Dr Adams receives $5,000 from ABR. Readers will have an early opportunity to hear Michael Adams talk about, and read from, his essay at the Calibre ceremony, which will take place on Thursday, 1 June at the University of Wollongong, where he teaches.

Michael Adams told Advances: ‘Winning the Calibre Prize is an incredible honour. I have followed Calibre for many years, and drawn much inspiration and insight from previous winners. I hope my essay highlights some hard issues: I take Rebecca Solnit’s position that we write the stories that we can’t tell anyone.’

Darius Sepehri (photograph by Elena Carletti)This year we have added a second prize, worth $2,500. Darius Sepehri, a PhD student at the University of Sydney, is the recipient. His essay, titled ‘To Speak of Sorrow’, will appear in the August issue. He told Advances: ‘Together the Calibre essays constitute a spirited conversation in Australian writing. With other readers, I’ve followed the golden threads of themes running through them: memory, landscape, belonging, kin, loss, and presence. I am delighted to join essayists that have given us playful and provocative reflections, commanding arguments, and defences of the nobility of art and the inner life.’

ABR is grateful to Colin Golvan QC and the ABR Patrons, who make these two prizes possible.

The judges have also commended essays by Sara Dowse (‘Making Things’) and Meng Jin (‘Change, We, Art’). These essays will appear in coming issues of ABR.

Fellowships galore

We’re delighted to announce two more ABR Fellowships, each worth $7,500.

Margeurite JohnsonMarguerite Johnson is the ABR Gender Fellow. Her project is titled ‘Mapping Gender, Sexuality and the Environment: Picnic at Hanging Rock Fifty Years On.’ This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Joan Lindsay’s novel, which was subsequently filmed by Peter Weir and recently dramatised by Tom Wright. Dr Johnson was chosen by Andrea Goldsmith, Peter Rose, and Ilana Snyder. We are grateful to Emeritus Professor Anne Edwards AO for enabling us to offer this Fellowship.

Philip JonesPhilip Jones is the 2017 ABR Patrons’ Fellow. Such was the quality of the field for the second ABR RAFT Fellowship – recently awarded to Elisabeth Holdsworth – that we have decided to fund two additional Fellowships, including this one. Philip Jones’s project is titled ‘Beyond Songlines’. He will ‘probe European attempts at defining terms such as “dreaming” and “songlines”’. This Fellowship is funded by ABR’s many Patrons.

Straight at the hood

What’s the first feature you read in The New Yorker? (Tweet us, as they automatically say on Radio National.) For Advances, ‘Bar Tab’ notwithstanding, it’s Anthony Lane’s fortnightly film review. Lane, who has been writing for the magazine since 1993, is wise, witty, and often withering. (Remember his line about one forgettability starring Rain Phoenix: ‘Rain, Rain, go away.’) In the April 24 issue Lane reviewed Terence Davies’ new film, A Quiet Passion, with Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson. Lane applied Dickinson’s technique in his facing review of F. Gary Gray’s film The Fate of the Furious. Here’s the first stanza: ‘Because I could not stop for Vin – / He would not stop for me – / But drove his Dodge straight at the hood / Of my – Infiniti –’.

Advances saw A Quiet Passion last year, during the British Film Festival, just before the ABR US tour, which took us to Amherst, Massachusetts. We thought of Cynthia Nixon’s remarkable performance as we stepped, a little abashedly, into the upstairs bedroom where Dickinson wrote all of those invincible poems.

Cynthia Nixon and Jennifer Ehle in A Quiet Passion
(image courtesy of Palace Films)

Apropos of which, Dickinsonians should not be without Cristanne Miller’s fine new edition Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As she preserved them (Belknap Press [Footprint]), $99.99 hb, 855 pp, 9780674737969). This is the first edition of Dickinson’s work to distinguish the 1,000 or so poems that she chose to copy onto folded sheets from the many that survive only on envelopes or scraps of paper.

Anwen Crawford will review A Quiet Passion for ABR Arts. (The film is released here on June 15.)

Red Room Poetry Fellowship

Ali Cobby EckermannAli Cobby Eckermann, winner of the 2017 Windham–Campbell Literary Prize, has been awarded the inaugural Red Room Poetry Fellowship.

Eckermann will receive a ‘no-strings’ stipend of $5,000, ‘a residency at the Bundanon Trust’, the opportunity to deliver a number of paid workshops, and ‘present a public address during the year-long Fellowship’.

‘I’m at that time in my career where actual writing time is essential and I’m grateful for the opportunities this residency will bring’, said Eckermann, who was selected from ‘a formidable pool of Australian poets’, which included Kent McCarter, Elizabeth Allen, and Stuart Cooke. In a generous move, Red Room will also award commissions to the other nine shortlisted poets, due to the high calibre of submissions received.

Arts journalism

Much dismay has been expressed at the contraction of resources devoted to arts criticism by Fairfax Media. Overseas, we know, many newspapers have dropped arts reviews altogether. Elsewhere, reviews have shrunk to a paltry 100 or 200 words. It’s one reason why ABR has opted to expand its repertoire to include reviews of film, theatre, music, dance, art exhibitions, and more. We now import more of these reviews from the website, where they appear open-access thanks to support from The Ian Potter Foundation.

ABR Arts is now a core part of this enterprise, and we are actively looking for arts journalists around Australia. Our contributors are all paid properly and closely edited. We also give them due space to mount intelligent arguments, not just breathless précis.

Jolley at the EWF

ABR is pleased to be taking part in the Emerging Writers’ Festival (14 to 23 June). The Festival features a number of special events aimed at new and emerging writers including sessions and masterclasses for those interested in programming, screenwriting, pitching work to publishers, and digital self promotion. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of Melina Marchetta’s Looking For Alibrandi, the EWF is even hosting its own high school formal on Saturday June 17.

Two of the 2017 Jolley Prize judges will appear in panels on 20 June during a day-long masterclass on the short story. Ellen van Neerven will appear on a panel about editing short fiction, and ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu will discuss short story competitions with 2014 Jolley Prize winner and author Jennifer Down, and David Tenenbaum and Pia Gaardboe from Melbourne Books. Visit the Emerging Writers Festival website for more information and ticketing details.

Meanwhile, our three judges (Chris Flynn is the third) are deciding this year’s Jolley Prize (worth a total of $12,500). The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August Fiction issue, and the winner will be revealed at a special ceremony in Sydney later that month.

SMH Best Young Australian Novelists

ABR was delighted to see two recent Jolley Prize winners among the four novelists selected by The Sydney Morning Herald as this year’s Best Young Australian Novelists. Congratulations to all four authors – Jennifer Down, author of Our Magic Hour (reviewed here by Gretchen Shirm) and 2014 Jolley Prize winner for ‘Aokigahara’; Josephine Rowe, author of A Loving, Faithful Animal (reviewed here by Kate Holden) and 2016 Jolley Prize winner for ‘Glisk’); Julie Koh, author of Portable Curiosities (reviewed here by Cassandra Atherton); and Rajith Savanadasa, author of Ruins (reviewed here by Claudia Hyles)!

Calling young science writers!

The UNSW Bragg Student Prize for Science Writing is now open to students across Australia in Years Seven to Ten. This year’s essay topic is ‘Future Earth: Creating a more sustainable planet by 2030’. Students will have up to 800 words to discuss ‘challenges in developing sustainable energy, managing food sources, clean water, waste, and protecting biodiversity.’

The winner will be awarded a $500 voucher to UNSW Bookshop and a subscription to Australian Book Review. The essay will be published in CSIRO’s Double Helix magazine, Cosmos Magazine’s online blog, CareerswithSTEM.com, and the NewSouth website. Entries close 20 August, 2017.

The Prize is supported by UNSW Press and UNSW Science. For guidelines and more information, visit the Prize website.

Raging élites

Dear Editor,
Until the May 2017 issue, ABR had managed to keep its anti-Trump animus relatively subdued, but with James McNamara’s review of two satirical books on Trump, the levée has broken and the magazine has fed its tributary into the liberal élite’s torrent of rage and resentment at American voters for electing a bozo and/or fascist.

When, after a flurry of ad hominem anti-Trump jabs, McNamara’s invective finally abates and he gets around to asking how such a cruel buffoon could win, he ticks off all the obligatory, but largely innocent, suspects: the Russians, misogyny, Fake News, James Coney [sic], and the ‘hideous racism, sexism, and xenophobia that has always run through American society’. Absent, however, is any mention of Trump’s major policy theme of the malignity of neo-liberal globalisation. Unmentioned by McNamara are the factory-shuttering effects of ‘free trade’ and the off-shoring of manufacturing industries to low-wage countries; the job-displacement arising from the import of cheap immigrant labour; and the community-eroding effects of open borders.

It has been widely accepted that the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles led directly to the rise of National Socialism in Germany and to the horrors of World War II. The punitive effects on the German economy, the affront to German honour, and the unleashing of decadence and nihilism in its wake led to the appeal of extreme nationalism and the call for revenge.

From the end of World War I, powerful voices in the British establishment reinforced this view. Maynard Keynes and Harold Nicolson, junior delegates at the Paris Peace Conference, were among them. Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), which he later recanted, was a polemic against the injustice of the settlement. He condemned the ‘web of Jesuit exegesis’ spun by the most ‘hypocritical draughtsmen’, and referred to ‘imbecile greed’. Most famously, he called it a ‘Carthaginian peace’, a reference to the brutal peace Rome exacted from Carthage, including mass executions, sale into slavery, and wholesale destruction of property, at the end of the Punic Wars in the second century BCE. Keynes hopped into the efforts of Billy Hughes, too, the Australian prime minister whose influence at Versailles is rarely grasped here, and who furiously opposed the Americans and argued forcefully for the interests of the British dominions.

For those seeking a concise illustrative history of the Vietnam War, Marcelino Truong’s graphic novel, Such a Lovely Little War, is the ideal place to begin. Those seeking a graphic novel memoir as engaging as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986–92) or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2001–2), will be unsatisfied.

‘Marco’, as the author is referred to in this book, is the son of a Vietnamese diplomat, Khánh, and his French wife, Yvette. His family, including his two older siblings, were yanked from the ‘cherry pie’ idyll of America in the early 1960s when Khánh was recalled to Saigon as the war between the North and South began to escalate. In addition to the historical events and atrocities that unfold around them, the Truongs must endure Yvette’s undiagnosed bipolar disorder, triggered by a mixture of anxiety for the safety of her family and a longing to return to ‘civilisation’.

In architectural terms, if no other, the Australian counterpart to the famous World War II code breaking centre at Bletchley Park initially could not have been more different. While Alan Turing and his celebrated colleagues cracked the German Enigma code at a secluded mansion in the English countryside, Australia’s code breakers began working out of a nondescript apartment block situated on a busy inner-city thoroughfare in Melbourne opposite a public golf course.

The Monterey apartment building still stands on Queens Road, Albert Park, though there is no hint as to the history making top-secret work that went on there. Back in the day, a brand-new building was considered ideal office space, as no one had moved in who would need to be relocated. A subsequent unit known as Central Bureau was set up in Cranleigh, an ivy-clad gabled mansion in South Yarra that more closely resembled the leafy environs of Bletchley Park.

The fact that so much of the military intelligence effort was concentrated in Victoria during the early part of the war was testament to the real fear at that time of a Japanese invasion of Australia. Strict curfews and other air raid precautions were observed in Melbourne, as if the threat level was similar to that faced by London. (Later, when the fear of invasion had receded, much of the Central Bureau’s operations were moved north to Queensland, and then relocated to the Philippines once the Japanese forces were in retreat.)

Walking the streets, reading his books
in the cafés and bars, this was his over-
riding question: would he be liked in
prison?

He was not particularly bad, or good, or
graceful, or skeptical. He reckoned he
belonged to the median when it came to
the smokers of Lwów: but would he be
liked in prison?

After Georgia O’Keeffe: Series 1 – From the Plains, 1919 and Back Door with Snow, 1955

‘The essential thing is what we always miss.’

Jorge Luis Borges

Daniel Findlay’s début novel, Year of the Orphan, contains all the elements apparently necessary for a successful contemporary dystopian novel. It is also a complex, challenging read, which creates a believable and alarming post-apocalyptic future in the Australian outback five hundred years in the future.

The key character and main narrator is a young female in peril (so favoured in recent dystopian fiction) known as ‘the Orphan’. Sold into slavery at an early age, she has grown up in a barbaric desert settlement known as ‘the System’. She survives by scavenging in the rapidly disappearing remains of the old world – destroyed by some nameless apocalyptic occurrence – in the process confronting numerous predators, human and animal, creatures that may be ghosts, and a wandering stranger called the Reckoner.

The epigraph to the first chapter of Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden speaks of Nebelung, a time of great prosperity, joy, and hope for new life. Over the page, Hornung shatters any sense of well-being with an extraordinary opening sentence: ‘On a mild Nebelung’s afternoon, Matthias Orion, having lived as an exclamation mark in the Wahrheit settlement and as the capital letter at home, killed himself.’ The prose just keeps getting better as Hornung counterpoints the consciousness of a man driven to murder and suicide with the heartbreaking innocence of his unknowing adolescent son, Benedict.

Two storylines are in conversation throughout this impressive novel. One follows Benedict, who withdraws from human contact and speech, seeking refuge among the horses and chickens on his father’s farm. Hornung takes us deep inside Benedict’s mind and heart. In a narrative that has much to say about the inadequacy of words, she uses them powerfully to convey the boy’s tortured grief, confusion, and despair. The second storyline concerns the goings on in Wahrheit, a small religious community to which Benedict and his family once belonged. Wahrheit, founded in exile to await the Messiah, is now under the spiritual guidance of Pastor Helfgott. He is a good man who cares deeply for his flock, but he lacks the authority and charisma of his late father. Pastor Helfgott continues to preach from his father’s The Book of Seasons, but the ‘passionate certainty of those loved words’ begins to falter; the threads that once held this community together are unravelling.

Datsunland, a collection of short stories and the latest from Stephen Orr, is in many ways flawed. The collection is uneven: the final (titular) work is a novella previously published in a 2016 issue of Griffith Review, which overwhelms the earlier, shorter stories, exhibiting the depth and nuance which several others lack. The narratives and characters alike at times are underdeveloped, and rely on well-worn tropes of the Australian Gothic. And the return of objects and places through the stories, (most notably the all-boys school Lindisfarne College), which acts to structure the stories in reference to one another, occasionally feels tokenistic or forced. But despite this, the collection works. At its best, the writing is insightful and strangely beautiful. Even at its weaker moments, it is consistently powerful. Orr holds the collection together with an impression of force and linguistic brutality.

Orr’s last novel The Hands (2015) was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin and was described in Josephine Taylor’s review as having ‘the scope of a Greek tragedy’ (ABR, December 2015), a quote which appears on the back cover of Datsunland. While The Hands follows a single family, Datsunland opens up into a broader interrogation of Australian life, through a series of unflinching portraits which traverse the South Australian landscape, and draw on connections of migration, religion, and colonialism to reach back towards Ireland. It takes on many of the same questions as The Hands in its return to rural experiences, but consistently refuses resolution.

No More Boats is Felicity Castagna’s newest work since Small Indiscretions (2011), a collection of short stories, and her award-winning Young Adult novel, The Incredible Here and Now (2013). This versatile writer depicts a plausible community set in Sydney’s inner west in 2001 and an ageing Italian migrant, Antonio Martone, whose life is falling apart and whose crises coincide with the Australian government’s obsession with secure borders. From the book’s first pages, we sense that Martone will soon reach a point of exasperation and will act out his frustrations with a gun. His actions will coincide with the political manipulation of the MV Tampa and the attack on the Twin Towers. What leads to that moment is the heart of this story

Chapters are devoted to each of the four Martones: Antonio, his wife Rose, and their adult children, Clare and Francis. The third-person narration moves seamlessly through their interconnected lives and from past to present, involving other characters who will be instrumental in the story.

Gravity Well opens with Carl Sagan’s famous ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ quote, suggesting themes of astronomy, loneliness, and humanity’s cosmic insignificance. Though I was immediately smitten with the cover design (a nebula-coloured orb, its top and bottom halves depicting mirrored but not identical female silhouettes amid a sea of cosmic black), I worried that the novel might overdo the astronomy analogies. Yet it soon became apparent that Melanie Joosten’s writing is as subtle as it is intelligent. The astral references are frequent but add interest and depth. All appear well-researched, and many – such as the Voyager Golden Records – sent me googling for more.

Gravity Well follows the intertwining stories of Lotte – an astronomer who leaves her husband in Canberra to take up a job in Chile – and Lotte’s best friend, Eve, who is in the throes of grief after a tragedy. The character-driven narrative delves into the psyches and memories of each as chapters alternate between their points of view. Jumping back and forth in time through their reminiscences is both a narrative strategy and a thematic concern as Joosten explores the nature of time and its perception. For Lotte, ‘retrospect works like a telescope: looking back in time to predict what will come – but never soon enough’. For Eve, raw grief makes her feel ‘in two places at once, the then and the now’.

Sara Dowse is a fine observer of politics and power. Her new novel, As the Lonely Fly, traverses three continents over fifty years and contains a multitude of characters, but its focus is honed in on three sisters, of sorts. While Chekhov’s play of that name is typified by waiting, Dowse’s story is of continuous flux and upheaval. Clara-later-Chava, Manya-later-Marion, and Zipporah flee from Ukraine’s pogrom-soaked landscape to markedly different lands of promise; America and Palestine – known to them as Eretz Israel, the longed for Land of Israel.

Closing Down is about survival and the rituals that allow it; those that keep the fraying edges of life and society together, that stop a relationship disintegrating, that stave off insanity. In her début novel – which won the inaugural Richell Prize for Emerging Writers – Susan Abbott asks: how do you survive when your world is breaking into pieces?

Abbott’s narrative alternates between Clare and Robbie. Through them, we glimpse a world crippled by climate change and economic crisis, where recurring disasters become nothing more than a ‘few words flickering quickly by on a screen’. Both characters have rituals for survival. For Clare, walking and recording the dusty lineaments of the decaying town of Myamba keep her alive, despite the ‘unutterable sadness of it all’. Robbie’s love for his partner, Ella, sustains him, but, increasingly, ignoring a world that has ‘become far too much to bear’ is the only way to cope.

Tim Winton is embarrassing to Australian literary critics. It is not that it is impossible to form adequate literary judgements about the nature of his work. It is simply that any judgements one might form seem so totally irrelevant. Winton’s work makes plain a certain disconnect between the interests and imperatives of Australian literary criticism and those of the reading public who buy each of his titles in their hundreds of thousands.

Lyn McCredden has bravely decided to broach this impasse in The Fiction of Tim Winton. The book is published by Sydney University Press, which is slowly filling the role once played by UQP in publishing literary studies of Australian authors. McCredden’s book on Winton joins Robert Dixon’s excellent study of Alex Miller, Nicholas Birns’s astute assessment of contemporary Australian literature, and Brigitta Olubas’s edited collection of essays on Shirley Hazzard, all from Sydney.

David Marr’s Quarterly Essay, The White Queen: One Nation and the politics of race (2017) is a comprehensive and scholarly look at Pauline Hanson’s appeal, and what her revival, tepid as it may be in an international context, says about the way race has been exploited in the bread and circuses of politics. John Safran is equally interested in race, and says he has been following the far right out of the corner of his eye since high school, but his approach to examining racial politics is very different. While Marr’s is one of observation and disquisition through the impeccably researched essay, Safran’s is one of immersion, a Gonzo approach to decoding extremist elements by throwing himself into the heartland of the fringe groups. Safran is a character in his own work, and in Depends What You Mean By Extremist he becomes close, dangerously so at times, to his star radicals. His subjects don’t exactly trust him, but he is tolerated and some clearly see him as a meal ticket to wider recognition; this gives him unparalleled access. The book opens in mid-2015 at the height of the United Patriots Front (UPF) anti-Islam protests in Melbourne and takes the reader up to the 2016 federal election, and Hanson’s surprise resurgence. A tacked-on final chapter on Trump’s US election win is subtitled ‘Plot Twist II’.

I was a student at Sydney University when, in 1954, the embattled Labor leader Dr H.V. Evatt went public, accusing a small group of Labor MPs of disloyalty, their attempt to gain control of the party being directed from a source outside the labour movement. He identified the Melbourne News Weekly as their mouthpiece. Few had heard of B.A. (‘Bob’) Santamaria, who ran News Weekly, but his name now spread far and wide. The name had an exotic flavour, particularly when associated with a secret Catholic organisation known simply and mysteriously as ‘The Movement’. Soon we students were drunkenly singing an Evatt-oriented version of ‘Waltzing Matilda’ in which the chorus began ‘Santamaria, Santamaria, Keon and Mullens disloyal to me’ (Keon and Mullens being the two Victorian Labor MPs particularly associated with the Movement). Having come from an Anglican background, and having grown up at a time when sectarianism was still common, I tended to see Catholics as a regimented lot who did what they were told and attended Mass every Sunday. It therefore came as a surprise to me that what became known as ‘The Split’ was not only a split in the Labor Party but a split, with intellectual ramifications, in the Catholic community as well.

One of the many contradictions of Islamic State, as exposed in Robert Manne’s latest work, is that a mob seemingly dedicated to deeds rather than words is in fact logocratic. For all of their murderous antipathy towards the People of the Book, Islamic State has relied not on speeches or policy platforms, but on a succession of books.

While some trace the genealogy of Islamic State to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (from whom, Wahhabism) or the 1928 formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, and others insist it must be measured as commencing with the Qur’an in the seventh century, Manne argues for a more recent foundation: the writings of Sayyid Qutb. The quixotic Egyptian claimed that the world had fallen into jahiliyya (spiritual darkness). His remedy was violent struggle, which he commended as ‘an act of highest compassion’. A similar black-is-white contortion was Qutb’s decree that armed force was required to give people the freedom to choose Islam.

What does it mean to be human – nearly human, not-quite-human, or even inhuman? Such questions have preoccupied writers and researchers for centuries, from Charles Darwin and Mary Shelley to the uncanny valley of robotics, AI, and a trans-human future. In Wild Man from Borneo, Robert Cribb, Helen Gilbert, and Helen Tiffen explore this question through the prism of our relationship with one of our closest relatives, the orangutan.

Our similarity to apes and monkeys is both their most disturbing and most appealing feature. When I worked as a zookeeper, I disliked the primate round, mainly because the female baboons seemed to regard me as a rival for the dominant male’s affections. So I was surprised, when I left, that it was the primates I felt the need to farewell, particularly the young hand-reared orangutan Indah. The personable status of orangutans is evidenced by our ready recollection of Mollie at Melbourne Zoo or George at Adelaide Zoo, and the grief recently expressed over the unexpected death of Karta in childbirth.

The title neatly encapsulates the focus of this book. ‘Orangutan’ is Malay for ‘man of the forest’, and yet locally this term did not apply to the red ape but to human forest dwellers. Its misapplication seems to have been a Western error. The confusion continued with early accounts describing such bizarre creatures that it is not at all clear whether they were humans (‘wild’ or otherwise), orangutans, chimpanzees, or even gorillas.

Poetry books that focus on memory, recuperation, and loss are common, but it is rare to find poems that speak about such matters as sparely and eloquently as these do. Bill Manhire’s new poems are bony and sinewy, resonating with an awareness of public and personal grief. Although these works often speak by indirection, many of them pack a real punch. As Manhire probes the awkwardness of memory and recall, he also reflects on knowledge’s elusiveness.

There is a strong sense of the provisional throughout this book, and of words that gesture at issues they are unable to fully encompass. The poems are sometimes opaque, as if Manhire does not wish to completely yield up his meanings. Many of them also occupy the suspended place where human beings try to imagine and memorialise the dead – moving the reader towards the unimaginable and the irredeemable.

The opening poem, ‘Waiting’ sets the scene: ‘The window waits for light. / The path to the river waits / for twigs and stones and feet.’  The reader immediately understands that there are unresolved issues and significant indeterminacies afoot. ‘Poem in an Orchard’ develops these themes while introducing a more sombre note, evoking someone who topples ‘out of our quiet conversation / into the lower-level light, / out of family and creation / into what we have come to call the insect night’.

Antigone Kefala’s Fragments, her fifth book of poems and first since Absence: New and selected poems (1992), is often menaced by the past, like her first collection, The Alien (1973). Here too are some subtly demolishing portraits, as well as buoyant poems such as ‘Metro Cellist’ and the slightly brooding ‘Summer at Derveni’: ‘Afternoon heat / empty of voices / on the foil surface / heads drifting / like heavy ornaments.’ While early work transmuted the impact of her migrations from Romania to Greece to New Zealand to Australia into a pervasive sense of loss, these new poems allude to, rather than relate, such journeys that pass through languages and decades: ‘When they came back / their eyes were scorched / their hands like open wounds / the road, they said, / nothing but fire / no coolness / as they were promised / in the fables’ (‘Pilgrims’ Tales’).

As with Diane Fahey, Kefala is a keen observer of the world around her, but whereas Fahey aims for informed, yet vivid, notation of the natural world, Kefala’s descriptions are pertinently brief but sieved through discomfiting interpretation. At least two poems equate masculine power with violence: a gun like ‘a metal erection’ (‘Weapons’); ‘The killers / spoke in bullets’ (‘The Film’). Other poems are compressed psychological portraits: ‘He was lending us his presence / sure of its value. / His past, a famous story / he no longer challenged / he was wearing it now – / an ill fitting garment’ (‘Public Figure’).

Which critics most impress you?

Ones who write memorably, whose language combines critical acuity with verve. I could name many, but Robert Hughes, Peter Porter, Kerryn Goldsworthy, and Brian Matthews are four Australians critics I read and reread, and from whom I have learned much, even when I’ve disagreed with, or been provoked by, them.

What makes a fine critic?

Understanding, fairness, and an ability to read deeply, write honestly and dispassionately, with wit and gusto. Erudition helps, particularly when lightly worn. My four critics bring a formidable breadth of knowledge to their task, but they use it to explore and illuminate, not as a weapon of ego. I should be realistic about ego, though, about myself at least: I subscribe to George Orwell’s dictum: ‘Embrace the ego, revel in beauty, and write with a purpose.’

‘Coming out’ stories remain one of the most potent sources for young people to understand their own relationship to sex, gender, and sexuality. Living in a largely heteronormative society, many young people find a place in these stories to validate and challenge their thoughts and experiences. Nevo Zisin’s memoir, written at the age of twenty, covers these areas but also speaks to those living outside sex and gender binaries. In recent years there has been a wealth of resources developed for people who resist such classification, and it has become a burgeoning and popular field in independent publishing. Zisin’s preferred pronouns are ‘they’, ‘them’, and ‘their’. It has been some time since ‘they’ has become the preferred singular pronoun in common English usage, yet many people are still surprised when someone adopts ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.

This fascinating volume on the fate of Clara (Claretta) Petacci, mistress to Benito Mussolini, by distinguished historian R.J.B. Bosworth, is a meticulously researched and multi-layered account tracing the fateful relationship between the fascist dictator and his younger paramour. From the genesis of the affair to its well-known aftermath, Bosworth enlivens our understanding of the vicissitudes of the doomed partnership by bringing Claretta’s voice to the fore. Having with great care and thoroughness translated extracts from her personal diary and correspondence, he creates a compelling account of their relationship and its many travails.

What is money, how do we create it, and how politically significant is its production? In The Production of Money, political economist Ann Pettifor makes the striking claim that the way we currently produce money gives rise to one of the most substantial challenges facing Western democracy. But how could this be so? Money is produced by printing presses and there we have the end of it. What threat could it represent for democracy?

At present, the Western democratic institutions that have remained fundamentally unchanged since the settlements at the end of World War II are under considerable threat. Most notably – and this has been much discussed by various political pundits – there are powerful political groups who reject ideals such as the separation of powers and limits upon executive authority and who have used the economic upheavals and social dislocations resulting from the global financial crisis to pursue what are fundamentally anti-democratic agendas.

South Australia remains something of a national contradiction in terms, and this is brought out well in this richly diverse and varied collection of essays and stories. Shifting its focus away from Adelaide to many of South Australia’s older industrial and pre-industrial centres, including Whyalla, Port Augusta, the Riverland, and Clare, Griffith Review’s State of Hope is no tourist guide and does not contain any particularly useful historical overview for those who might want one. However, the editors ask an important question which those living in other states often want to know: what makes South Australia so different? The answers, and there are many, come together piece by piece in the reading of this collection. Few readers will be left unrewarded by at least some of the assembled guests at this particular literary dinner party.

Does William Shakespeare still matter? The question was posed frequently throughout 2016, the quatercentenary of his death. Those sceptical of Shakespeare’s enduring relevance faced the challenge of explaining the seemingly endless proliferation of films and adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in an age ostensibly dislocated from early modern sensibilities and politics. R.S. White’s timely book on the influence of Shakespeare on Hollywood cinema offers a refreshing account of the ‘contestatory and symbiotic’ relationship between Shakespeare’s generic innovations and the development of cinematic genres in early Hollywood. For White, although the influence of Shakespeare on contemporary film culture can be measured by the sheer number of explicit adaptations, a more significant legacy can be discerned in the degree to which Hollywood’s comedies of love exhibit ‘a deeper, structural analogy’ to Shakespeare on the level of genre itself.

White’s thesis is that Shakespeare’s presence in virtually every cinematic genre imaginable is less the product of the ‘apparent ease’ with which his plays can be referenced, but rather ‘the fact that his plays have had some part in the creation of these movie genres’. (An intriguing by-product of this claim is the observation that resistance to Anglo-centric tradition made France’s film industry a distinct outlier in the global market precisely because it escaped the formative influence of Shakespeare on its cinematic genres.) Occasionally, White overstates the originality or ‘singularity’ of Shakespeare (to borrow Gary Taylor’s term from Reinventing Shakespeare, 1989), but his usual practice is to more cautiously suggest that ‘Shakespeare helped to prioritise some paradigms of love’ that were ‘absorbed into movies’.

This study, which first appeared in German in 2011, was hailed at the time as definitive: properly so, as it incorporates so many aspects from so many areas of research. It marks a significant contribution to such fields as musicology, cultural history, the relationship between art and politics – not just in the Nazi era, but the periods preceding that, which saw the emergence of the two orchestras – and the role of the state and of the audience in shaping repertoire, and the relationship between the orchestra and the media.

The introduction manages the difficult task of summarising the crucial historical issue of ‘two cities, two orchestras’ while also reminding the reader of more contemporary questions such as the ‘German sound’ of the Berlin Philharmonic – which led to what the author describes as a ‘hot debate ... [which] emerged from a polemic against the principal conductor of the orchestra, Simon Rattle’ – versus the Vienna Philharmonic’s approach, which ‘hews neither to the German sound nor even an Austrian one’. These convenient shorthand descriptions are deftly set against each other and analysed, even before the author spells out the work’s primary aim.

Jeff Buckley is a man frozen in time, not just by virtue of being elevated into the pantheon of ‘died-too-early-rock-gods’. Before his untimely drowning in 1997, Buckley appeared to exist in a sort of musical and emotional stasis: a young fogey caught among the cultural ruins and vestiges of his estranged father, who died aged twenty-eight from a heroin overdose in 1975. It is a topic that Jeff Apter passes over but doesn’t mine in his re-released Jeff Buckley biography, A Pure Drop.

Charles Green and Anthony Gardner’s Biennials, Triennials, and Documenta: The exhibitions that created contemporary art represents an apposite study of the biennials and triennials – also known as mega-exhibitions – that are proliferating around the world. Apposite since, with the exception of Bruce Altshuler’s two-volume account from 1863 to 2002, no art-historical text has offered a scholarly appraisal of these extravaganzas.

The current tally of international mega-exhibitions is a whopping 207, of which thirty-four will take place in 2017. They range from the grandfather of them all: the Venice Biennale, founded in 1895; the most august: documenta (founded in 1955 and occurring every five years); to the new kids on the block: Karachi Biennale; Garage Triennial of Russian Contemporary Art; and Desert X in the Coachella Valley, California (each launched in 2017). Melbourne will host the inaugural NGV Triennial in December. Remarkably, 2017 also brought the first Antarctic Biennale; an expedition aboard a research ship-cum-cruise vessel which took place over twelve days in March.

Chester Wilmot was on board British Airways Flight 781 on 10 January 1954 when it exploded in midair and crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the island of Elba. He was forty-two years old, a distinguished wartime broadcaster, a bestselling historian, a BBC regular, the military correspondent for the Observer and a pioneer of documentary television. He was at the peak of his powers, a success at everything to which he’d turned his mind since his days at Melbourne University, when he led the debating team on a triumphant world tour.

His wife, Edith, was at Heathrow Airport waiting for that ill-fated flight. Years later she remembered how they took the listing off the noticeboard. She recalled her daughter, Caroline, in tears, screaming: ‘My father was Chester Wilmot, he was a famous, famous man.’