Yes to Equality

Ratification of the marriage equality postal survey by the High Court of Australia prompted Australian Book Review to invite a number of writers, artists, directors, lawyers, commentators and public figures to sign an open letter on the subject. The response was positive and immediate. The Open Letter, which appears in our October issue, is intended as a respectful contribution from some of the most prominent people in the arts in Australia.

This debate is about equality – no more, no less. Homosexual acts are perfectly legal in Australia. Gays and lesbians (tax-paying and law-abiding citizens) seek the same right that applies to heterosexuals: the freedom to marry their partners if they so choose. This right applies in many countries, including Britain, Germany, and the United States. Gays and lesbians serve in our defence and police forces, they educate our children and work in our hospitals, they entertain us and illuminate our lives through literature and the performing arts. The time for distrust and discrimination is over.

Peter Rose, Editor and CEO, Australian Book Review

Open Letter

In the interest of fairness, equality and social reform, we encourage Australians to vote Yes in the same-sex marriage postal survey.

Nicole Abadee
Louise Adler AM
Patrick Allington
Dennis Altman AM
Robyn Archer AO
Neil Armfield AO
Amy Baillieu
Maxine Beneba Clarke
Neal Blewett AC
Frank Bongiorno
Helen Brack
James Bradley
Bernadette Brennan
Geraldine Brooks AO
John Bryson AM
Peter Burch AM
Michelle Cahill
Steven Carroll
J.M. Coetzee
Sophie Cunningham
Li Cunxin
Donna Curran
Joy Damousi
Jo Daniell
Jim Davidson
Glyn Davis AC
Michelle de Kretser
Brett Dean
Robert Dessaix
Ian Dickson
Catherine Dovey
Mark Edele
Anne Edwards AO
Tony Ellwood
Helen Ennis
Gareth Evans AC QC
Suzanne Falkiner
Morag Fraser AM
Margaret Gardner AO
Helen Garner
Max Gillies AM
Andrea Goldsmith
Kerryn Goldsworthy
Peter Goldsworthy AM
Anna Goldsworthy
Colin Golvan QC
Kate Grenville
Tom Griffiths AO
Dilan Gunawardana
Gideon Haigh
Rodney Hall AM
Fiona Hall AO
Cathrine Harboe-Ree
Ashley Hay
Paul Hetherington
Michael Heyward
Kate Holden
Sarah Holland-Batt
Lindy Hume
Frank Jackson AO
Jill Jones
Gail Jones
Nicholas Jose
Mireille Juchau
Paul Kane
John Kinsella
Louis Klee
Ellen Koshland
Benjamin Law
David McAllister AM
Patrick McCaughey
Phillipa McGuinness
Eddie McGuire AM
James McNamara
Kim Mahood
David Malouf AO
Randal Marsh
Lynley Marshall
Philip Mead
Christopher Menz
Alex Miller
Jonathan Mills AO
Frank Moorhouse AM
Rod Morrison
Bruce Pascoe
Kerryn Phelps AM
Margaret Plant
Felicity Plunkett
David Poulton
Ron Radford AM
Robert Reynolds
John Rickard
Libby Robin
Peter Rose
Leo Schofield AM
Julianne Schultz AM
Kim Scott
Robert Sessions AM
Jim Sharman
Brett Sheehy AO
Michael Shmith
Peter Singer AC
Jason Smith
Ilana Snyder
Elizabeth Stead
Jackie Stricker-Phelps
Magda Szubanski
Carrie Tiffany
Christos Tsiolkas
Noel Turnbull
Mary Vallentine AO
Jacki Weaver AO
Jen Webb
Terri-ann White
Robyn Williams AM
Kim Williams AM
Lyn Williams AM
Kip Williams
Bob Wurth
William Yang

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

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines, one of the most influential books about Australia to reach an international audience. It appeared just months after The Fatal Shore (1986) by Robert Hughes, and a year before the first major international exhibition of Aboriginal art, Dreamings, opened in New York City, at the Asia Society. The Songlines was a best-seller internationally and sold well in Australia too; it has been in print continuously since 1987. Chatwin died barely eighteen months after the book’s release. Indeed, the book’s deviations from its own plot in its second half, and its rather fractured recourse to journal entries reflected Chatwin’s sudden intimation of mortality.

Shortly after Songlines’ release and at the height of its popularity Chatwin was approached by a filmmaker with a suggestion for a documentary, but he demurred on the grounds that it was a work of fiction. This sounds disingenuous, for Chatwin’s books all shifted shape between travel-writing and the novel, fiction and non-fiction. His realisation that several key propositions in Songlines could not be sustained in a documentary seems a more likely explanation. Chatwin’s main anthropological informants in Australia shared similar impressions of his readiness to make five from two and two, and that he would not always let the facts get in the way of a good story. One of Chatwin’s biographers has described the book as a blend of philosophical enquiry and fiction, identifying its structural models as Diderot’s novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître (similarly a narrator in dialogue with enlightened informants), and Plato’s Symposium and The Apology.

This might not matter much were it not for the fact that it has been no light matter to transform popular understandings of Aboriginal culture during the course of Australian history. Chatwin seems to have done that with a single word. It is the word many people turn to when they are asked to account for Aboriginal religion, spiritual belief, or cosmology. The other term most often used is ‘Dreaming’, or its earlier variant, ‘Dreamtime’. What interests me about these terms, and even earlier words or phrases such as ‘walkabout’ or ‘never-never’, is their indeterminate character. They have no solid centre and their definitions remain elusive. The reasons for that are intriguing and they take us into the history of engagement between Aboriginal and European cultures.

While it is true that the essay as a genre has a long and continuous history, it is not always an easy form to categorise or define. J.M. Coetzee has himself contrasted the ‘rather tight discourse’ of criticism with the relative freedom of writing fiction. Indeed, essays – like those collected in this volume – require ‘slow reading’, a term derived from Friedrich Nietzsche’s statement that he was a ‘teacher of slow reading’. Coetzee’s essays, twenty-three of which are collected here as Late Essays: 2006–2017, are exemplars of his own careful reading while also providing engaging, accessible, and informative insights into writers and their works. They have all been previously published, either as introductions to new editions of books, as book chapters, or as reviews (most notably in the New York Review of Books, to which Coetzee regularly contributes). Unlike his novels, the essays are direct and unambiguous, offering not only one writer’s evaluation of another writer but also the astute assessments of a lifelong teacher of literature.

This is the third in what now can be seen as a trilogy of essay collections gleaned mostly from Coetzee’s published reviews, the previous two being Stranger Shores: Essays 1986–1999 (2001) and Inner Workings: Literary essays 2000–2005 (2007). His earlier academic essays, published in White Writing: On the culture of letters in South Africa in 1988, have become standard reading for anyone wishing to gain an understanding of South African literary culture; as has Doubling the Point: Essays and interviews (1992), in which Coetzee’s essays are contextualised with interviews that probe his intellectual autobiography.

The Choke is full of holes. I mean that literally, which is also to say (since we are talking about a novel) symbolically. It contains any number of insinuating references to wounds, ditches, gaps, and voids. The primary implication of these can be grasped if one recalls that ‘nothing’ was Elizabethan slang for female genitalia. Sofie Laguna’s narrator, a ten-year-old girl named Justine Lee, who has a nervous habit of thrusting her tongue in and out of the gap created by her missing teeth, is constantly being reminded that she has ‘no thing’. In the masculine world of knives and guns she inhabits, the secondary status this lack bestows upon her is reinforced in all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle ways, often with an element of innuendo and menace. On the very first page, one of her two older brothers threatens to shoot her with his slingshot in the ‘hole’ of her gummy mouth if she smiles. Shortly after a scene in which she is attacked by an aggressive rooster named Cockyboy, which slashes her face, the idea that her femaleness is not simply a deficiency but a form of mutilation is made explicit when Jamie, the teenaged scion of the rival Worrley family, attacks her on the way to school, having first taunted her by grabbing at her skirt and calling out ‘show us your scar’.

Patrick Modiano’s most recent novel, published just before he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2014, is his twenty-sixth to date, though one of a great number to arrive almost all at once in the English-speaking world. In the post-Nobel flurry to translate Modiano into English, the past two years have marked a shift in the author’s status from practically unknown to international renown.

There has been an argument going on in the Liberal Party about the nature of the Menzies heritage – was Robert Menzies, the founder of the modern party, a liberal or a conservative? Notably absent from this discussion has been the national figure who was the first leader of a united anti-Labor party and who also happens to have been a father of Federation, Alfred Deakin. If our politicians still read books – and sometimes one does wonder – Judith Brett’s new biography, The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, should be required reading. As Brett has pointed out, the minority governments of the Federation’s first decade were extraordinarily productive in laying the legislative foundations of the new Commonwealth, in stark contrast to the parliamentary paralysis of recent years.

Australian academic historians were slow to embrace biography, tending to regard a book about the life of one person as not being ‘real’ history, which they saw as requiring a capacity to generalise. J.A. La Nauze’s two-volume biography of Deakin (1965) did much to change attitudes, but that was more than fifty years ago, and although much has been written about Deakin and the politics of Federation since then, there has been a need for a new synthesis, a new ‘life’, for our times. Brett is well equipped for the task, knowledgeable in the politics of anti-Labor as the author of Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) and Australian Liberals and the Moral Middle Class (2003). La Nauze began his biography in traditional style, describing the voyage of Deakin’s English immigrant parents, William and Sarah, to Australia. Brett, on the other hand, cheekily sets up a comparison of Alfred, born in Melbourne in 1856, with another native-born Australian, Ned Kelly, born just one year earlier. Deakin actually witnessed Kelly’s hanging in 1880, possibly as a representative of The Age, but it seems we don’t know how he reacted to the execution. The son of an Irish convict, Kelly has been incorporated into one version of the Australian legend associated with the unionised shearers. But Deakin, Brett suggests, as a middle-class, religiously inclined intellectual, ‘sits uneasily as a representative Australian figure’. Courteous, well-educated, urbane, and much liked, ‘Deakin was never a mate’. For all his charm and friendliness (he acquired the nickname ‘Affable Alfred’), ‘he always held himself a little aloof’. A Canberra suburb, a federal electorate, and a university bear his name, but most Australians would have no idea who this Deakin was. Why should we know him better? What might he have to say to us?

For decades, centuries, millennia, homosexuals (here as elsewhere) have been insulted, blackmailed, beaten, incarcerated, and murdered. Even now, homophobia and violence towards homosexuals remain principal causes of suicide and despair in our society, especially among young males. In numerous countries, homosexual acts are illegal and punishable by death or imprisonment. Remember those two young men in Aceh – our neighbour and ally – who were flogged and reviled in public? Only a fool or a bigot would suggest that homosexuals have never had it so good.

In Australia, the hard-won reforms of the 1970s and 1980s – absurdly belated yet ferociously contested in some states – came just in time. National self-respect is not endlessly plastic.

Yet the cultural warriors, serenaded by their ‘choir of the just’ in the media and the churches, still seem convinced that homosexuals are submissive, pliable, endlessly patient – forever grateful for the scraps of humanity they have been vouchsafed.

The recent debate about same-sex marriage has been one of the most unseemly episodes in our recent history. A legal entitlement that has been endorsed by untold opinion polls – with clear majorities across the country – has again been delayed because of internecine strife in the federal coalition. A postal ballot with dubious legal weight or status will further delay same-sex marriage and result in a divisive public debate – at quite a cost too. How far would $120 million go in our schools, our hospitals, our theatres, our laboratories? Yet again, gays and lesbians (plus their children) will be talked about and debated in ways that heterosexuals would find insufferable.

Do these people – these conservatives with their furrowed brows and anxieties – never stop to consider the indecency of judging our readiness or entitlement to behave like everyone else? Do they never consider our feelings during these torrid and tendentious debates? Do we not have organs, feelings, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? Are we such misfits, such nonentities?

How would these stalwarts like to have their morality, their fitness to marry, their sheer legitimacy incessantly debated, as if they were not even present in the room? One thinks of thoughtless parents gossiping about vexing children seated a few feet away – taking it all in.

Well, we have come this far, and we will not go back, and we will not be patronised indefinitely. Something ugly happened in August, and it will not easily be forgotten or excused. We know why these cultural warriors insisted on this postal ballot: to exploit unreason and to inflame prejudice.

Not all of us wish to marry. Some of us, truth be told, see no point in perpetuating that particular heterosexual model. But many gays and lesbians – law-abiding, tax-paying, peaceable citizens – do wish to marry. Why on earth should they be prohibited from doing so? What fool in government or the pulpit would seek to keep the loving and the loyal apart in the eyes of the law?

It says much for the power of love and the obstinacy of convention that a class that has been hurt and humiliated, taunted and trashed, imprisoned and grudgingly pardoned, should still crave acceptance in the eyes of government.

If and when this otiose and stupid opinion poll is conducted and reveals its likely message – overwhelming support for same-sex marriage – politicians would do well not to crow about it. There should be no homilies, no victory laps. Send us no salad bowls or condescensions. It will be years before some homosexuals forget the insults and fatuities of the past few weeks; years before the indignation and the bitter taste in our mouths have dissipated.

But if the bigots have their way and the No vote prevails, how craven Australia will seem in the eyes of most foreign countries. Already they look on us – with our British queen, our refugee policy, our freshened xenophobia – with mystification. A No vote would reinforce Australia’s reputation as an increasingly illiberal society – one burdened by prejudice and timidity.

For some of us, even more depressing than the homophobic pulse in this debate is the further evidence of a deep-seated and pathological fear of change in this country – change of any kind really. Few other wealthy, educated, secular societies are so unnerved by reform. It’s as if any reform – however harmless, sensible, popular, obvious – threatens the cultural warriors’ birthright or raison d’être. Remember Tony Abbott’s casual linkage of same-sex marriage with religious freedom and freedom of speech? What specious thinking and despicable tactics. How do fond exchanges of wedding vows threaten our freedom of speech? Abbott’s miserable interjections reminded us why he was unfit to be prime minister and why his premiership was so short-lived and inglorious.

If this innocuous social reform isn’t approved, there will be little hope for systemic reform in this country – little hope for major constitutional change or social advancement – and even less for civilised debate and intelligent politics.

Learn more about the Equality Campaign, a joint initiative of Australian Marriage Equality and Australians for Equality: www.equalitycampaign.org.au

You can listen to ABR Editor Peter Rose's Comment on the same-sex marriage debate here:

Jolley Prize

At a lively ceremony at Potts Point Bookshop on August 10, David Malouf named Eliza Robertson as the winner of the 2017 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize for her story ‘Pheidippides’. Robertson’s story ‘explores the changing relationships between a marathon runner, a journalist and his wife in the wake of tragedies. It is a powerfully observed, beautiful, and unflinching story that shows the different paths that people take to cope with grief and trauma,’ said Jolley Prize judge Amy Baillieu at the ceremony.

Bloomsbury Publishing ANZ's Managing Director Kate Cubitt accepts the 2017 Jolley Prize on Eliza Robertson's behalf, with ABR Editor Peter Rose

Eliza Robertson, who receives $7,000, commented: ‘I am overjoyed to win this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. My very first publication came from a magazine contest, so I know firsthand the opportunities they provide to new writers. I am incredibly grateful to ABR and the judges for choosing my story and helping me to connect with Australian readers.’

Dominic Amerena (Vic) receives $2,000 for his story ‘The Leaching Layer’ and Lauren Aimee Curtis (NSW) $1,000 for ‘Butter’. All three shortlisted stories appear in the August Fiction issue, which can be purchased online.

ABR thanks all those who entered this year’s Jolley Prize.

You can listen to a recording of the Jolley Prize ceremony on The ABR Podcast.

Auspicious preludes

There’s been a huge response to our call for entries in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is now worth a total of $8,500. The Prize is open until December 3.

But what of the next generation of Peter/Peta Porters? How to nourish and inspire younger poets? Thomas Mann once wrote, ‘Who is the poet? He whose life is symbolic.’ No one illustrated this better than William Wordsworth. Oxford University Press has just published a new edition of Wordsworth’s poem The Prelude (1805), which traces the growth of the poet’s creative imagination. Frank Kermode dubbed it ‘the greatest and most original of English autobiographies’. This is the first fully illustrated edition of The Prelude, a massive work in thirteen parts. In addition to 130 paintings and drawings, there are maps, marginal glosses, a chronology, and a lengthy introduction by the editors, James Engell and Michael D. Raymond. This superb volume is priced at $61.95.

Foreign affairs

Australia abounds in periodicals, and none is more welcome – or timely – than Australian Foreign Affairs, from the Black Inc. stable. Contributors to the first issue – to be launched on 17 October – include Paul Keating, Linda Jakobson, and George Megalogenis.

Jonathan Pearlman – a frequent contributor to ABR in the past – will edit Australian Foreign Affairs. He remarks: ‘Australia is increasingly affected by events beyond its borders, especially as global power and wealth shift towards Asia. The challenges facing Australia and the region are varied and complex, but they are also fascinating.’

On the Verge

Monash University Publishing has published the thirteenth edition of its creative writing annual Verge ($19.95 pb). The collection, edited by Bonnie Reid, Aisling Smith, and Gavin Yates, includes thirty original works from established and emerging writers. ABR volunteer Joan Fleming, who helps to select the poetry included in ABR’s pages, has two poems in the collection: ‘Allowances’ (Winner of the Verge Prize for Poetry) and ‘Trigger Questions’.

Awards galore

With the Porter Prize underway, and the 2018 Calibre Essay Prize set to open on 1 October, poets and essayists now have the chance to profit from the widespread exposure that attends ABR’s prizes. Award Winning Australian Writing 2017 (Melbourne Books, $29.95 pb), edited by Pia Gaardboe, collects works that have won forty-four of Australia’s numberless prizes. Among them are Louis Klee’s poem ‘Sentence to Lilacs’, joint winner of the 2017 Porter Prize, and Josephine Rowe’s story ‘Glisk’, winner of the 2016 Jolley Prize. Both works can also be read on our website.

Will Yeoman curates the 2018 Perth Writers’ Festival

Not perhaps since Leo Schofield was hired to direct the Melbourne International Arts Festival (1993–96), followed by the Sydney Festival (1998–2001), has an arts journalist been invited to curate/direct an arts festival – until now. Widely respected WA journalist Will Yeoman has been named as Guest Curator of the 2018 Perth Writers’ Festival. He assumes this role following the departure of long-time program manager Katherine Dorrington. The Perth International Arts Festival (PIAF) runs from 9 February to 4 March 2018.

Inga Clendinnen

It’s excellent to have a new, inexpensive, but still colour-illustrated edition of Inga Clendinnen’s indispensable book Dancing with Strangers, which won several prizes on publication in 2003. James Boyce, introducing the new Text Classics edition ($12.95 pb), writes: ‘Dancing with Strangers is an affirmation of the humanity of the Aboriginal people, the British settlers and the reader ... The focus of the book is to help ordinary Australians better understand what happened when the British first settled on Aboriginal land ... Its transformative power reflects this purity of purpose.’

What was your pathway to publishing?

In 1971 I founded the weekly newspaper that became Nation Review. Soon afterwards my proprietor, Gordon Barton, acquired Angus & Robertson and offered me the job of running the publishing company. I jumped at the opportunity.

What was the first book you published?

My first acquisition was Dennis Altman’s Homosexual, which had recently been published by a small press in the United States. Three months after publication it was the number two non-fiction bestseller here, ultimately establishing itself as an

When some years ago I read Jim Davidson’s outstanding biography, Lyrebird Rising (1994), I was initially concerned by what seemed to be his potentially distorting fascination with the scene-stealing Louise Hanson-Dyer. But I soon discovered I needn’t have worried. Jim Davidson is not the sort of biographer whose obsession with his subject overcomes proportion. On the contrary, his sense of humour, his alertness to the fallible, the ridiculous, and the noble reinforce rather than compete with his respect for, and absorption in, the recorded life. A style full of elegance, wit, and, when called for, irony, ranging from gentle to corrosive, constantly works sharply against any temptation to be over-impressed. In A Führer for a Father, however, this armoury is strained to its limits.

The title stands as an early warning: either it is ironic, pointing a little bleakly to an overbearing, uncompromising, but broadly acceptable tendency in the father, or it is meant to slide away from metaphor towards the meaning that the ordinary German word ‘führer’ has inevitably taken on since World War II: Führer und Reichskanzler des deutschen Volkes – a title only ever accorded to, and assumed by, one man. Any doubt or equivocation on this point that we may entertain as we begin reading A Führer for a Father, Davidson clears up in the first sentence of the first paragraph:

Towards the end of this handsome work, Mark Dapin makes the following observation: ‘There are many more holocaust memoirs written by Jews who emigrated from Europe to Australia than there are personal histories of Australian-born or raised Jewish soldiers. Everywhere in the world the Jewish story is focussed on persecution – the plight of refugees; the unspeakable horrors of the death camps – followed by redemption in the form of the foundation of the State of Israel in 1948. In Australia ... there is another history: that of a diaspora community that fought the Axis powers with courage, strength and a large measure of military skill.’ A military skill, Dapin suggests, that was in evidence from the very foundation of the colony of New South Wales.

Among the convicts who arrived on the First Fleet was a ‘Hebrew’ thief called Esther Abrahams and her infant daughter. Esther formed an alliance with Lieutenant George Johnston of the Royal Marines ‘while on the water’. In 1790 the couple had a son, Robert. At thirteen, Robert Johnston became the first native of New South Wales to join the Royal Navy. He saw action at Montevideo, Corunna, Cadiz and Chesapeake Bay. Back home, his father led the Rum Corps rebellion of 1808 replacing Governor Bligh to become lieutenant-governor, and the former convict Esther Abrahams became first lady. Robert rose to the rank of Commander of the Royal Navy in 1865, the same year John Monash was born in Melbourne.

For maybe one century the subject called Economics was monarch of the social sciences. Then the Western world was poorer than it is now, and many economists promised to find a pathway towards the abolition of hunger and unemployment. They also hoped to abolish war: the eager ideologies of free trade were believed by their disciples to be long-term recipes for international peace.

This Little History of Economics, beginning with the ancient Greeks, reaches 1776 after only five chapters. We see Adam Smith, after a sleepless night, walking in his dressing gown along a country road and mentally composing what ‘would become arguably the most celebrated book in the history of economics’. In The Wealth of Nations, this Scottish philosopher proposed that self-interest produced social harmony rather than chaos. As summarised in this valuable book, people do best for their nation by chasing their own interests rather than by playing ‘the Good Samaritan who wants to help strangers’.

On the final page of his biography of Yitzhak Rabin (1922–95), Itamar Rabinovich tells us that he contemplated an alternative subtitle for his book, ‘The image of his native landscape’. Because this particular life was so closely tied to a political project, it is similarly tempting to read Rabin’s biography as a story of the State of Israel, and to respond in kind: first according to your position on that State, and second according to how you evaluate Rabin’s performance against your ideal Israel. If you regard the 1948 War of Independence as an act of violent colonialism, then Rabin’s role in the Palmach (the proto-Israeli military) damns him to complicity, one that became active perpetration when he took on the task of transforming the infant Israeli Defence Force into an ironclad machine, and leading it, as chief of staff, in the 1967 Six Day War. If you regard the Oslo Accords as a betrayal of the Jewish people, on either religious or security grounds, then as the prime minister who authorised them, Rabin, as image, becomes the reckless traitor. It is a good thing that the author decided to discard this subtitle, because if one were to read the book thus, one may as well not read it at all. This is, after all, Israel we are talking about, and for almost every reader that die will already be cast.

Unless one is seduced by the ideology of self-creation, it is something of a truism that we are all shaped by our social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. What makes the story of a life intriguing are those mysterious junctures where it diverges from the foretold plot; what Hannah Arendt called the spaces between past and future, where authentic thinking and action occur, and the new comes into the world. In Rabin’s case, the new were the moves to make peace with Israel’s Arab neighbours, including the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat, and the Syrians under Hafez al-Assad. I leave to the side here the myriad criticisms one might level against what Israel envisaged that peace ought to look like, and how appallingly the Palestinians have fared since Oslo. One can always ask why Rabin was not Mandela, or an unalloyed universalist. More interesting is to ask why he was Rabin; how he moved from being a hawkish general and prime minister of a state whose political identity was forged in trauma, religious nationalism, and existential threat, to, in his own words, forging the war for peace.

The characters who populate Tony Birch’s Common People are striking not so much because they are the ordinary people, the commonplace or everyday people that the title would suggest – they are, mostly, people living in or with extremity and trauma – but because the thing that unites them in these stories are discoveries of small moments of common humanity. Some of these are exchanges, or gifts – a packet of cigarettes, a bowl of spaghetti, a kiss – others encounters with beauty or sublimity: a glass mural ceiling in an art gallery, a strain of music, a baby, a star.

Birch’s characters are all fringe-dwellers, in one sense or another. Most are poor, like the two single mothers desperate for work in ‘The Ghost Train’; others work precariously or illegally, as prostitutes, drug dealers, or car thieves. Others yet are dealing with pain, illness, or addiction, disrupted families or downright brutal institutions. Many live in historically hard places and times, such as isolated country towns in postwar Australia, or the fearful and conservative Howard era. But the most striking of Birch’s characters are his Aboriginal children: Noah Sexton, dismissed and belittled by his teacher and his peers because his family is ‘well known to the police’; the precocious Sissy and her friend Betty, students at a strict convent school in the city; the unnamed protagonist of ‘Colours’, cared for by his extended family on a reserve.

Barbara Kingsolver, praising the skill required to write a memorable short story, described the form as entailing ‘the successful execution of large truths delivered in tight spaces’. Her description certainly applies to Jennifer Down’s wonderful début collection, Pulse Points. Using the typical strategies of suggestion, ambiguity, and inconclusiveness of those ‘tight spaces’, Down’s fourteen realist stories raise important questions about family, sexual relationships, and the role of place and social aspiration in the shaping of identity. While these are familiar subjects for literary fiction, Pulse Points is especially memorable for its range of characters and voices, and for its often haunting expression of the partial nature of knowledge generated by the short story form.

One of the most moving enactments of Kingsolver’s claim is the story ‘Aokigahara’, which won the 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Narrated by a young Australian woman who travels to Japan in search of ‘answers’ following her brother’s death, the story uses shards of her memory, a structure of repeated deferral and the preternatural setting of a real forest, the notorious Sea of Trees, to evoke a melancholy sense of incompletion. It is also a story about the inadequacy of language to express profound grief, or to resolve the sister’s barely acknowledged feelings of guilt, or perhaps her own desire for oblivion. We hear all these possible meanings echoed in her affectless, passive voice. We also hear, in her repeated use of conventional syntax, enervated sentences which seem to lead nowhere in the very act of utterance. At times it feels like reading Samuel Beckett, leavened with the compassion of Alice Munro.

In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to resemble a pizza with too many toppings. Mostly, though, Carroll’s approach to fiction succeeds even when it seemingly shouldn’t. If it’s a mystery – a minor miracle, even – that the various techniques he employs come together to create stylised and yet fresh prose, then that mystery itself becomes part of the pleasure of reading a Carroll novel.

Carroll is also a serial serialist. A New England Affair, as with The Lost Life (2009) and A World of Other People (2013), riffs from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Here, Carroll makes use of Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ (1941), inspired by rocks off the Massachusetts coast, where Eliot grew up. When Carroll animates the rock, the waves, the wind, the coast, what is striking is how comparatively fragile his human characters are as they move through the physical and metaphysical world, making mistakes, enduring, ageing.

As with many of Carroll’s novels, the aching passage of time anchors A New England Affair: ‘The lead foot of Emily Hale steps on the accelerator, speeding into the past.’ The novel is a portrait of a long but secretive, platonic, and odd companionship between Eliot – American by birth, English by preference – and fellow New Englander Emily. Tom and Emily – or T.S. Eliot and Miss Hale, to give them their public titles – are a couple of sorts, their bond sometimes excruciatingly real but sometimes seemingly more akin to a sham.

Shaun Prescott’s début novel shares obvious conceptual territory with the fiction of Franz Kafka and Gerald Murnane, both of whom are mentioned in its promotional material. As with The Castle (1926) and The Plains (1982), The Town recounts the dreamlike experiences and observations of an enigmatic narrator–protagonist after he arrives in an unnamed town. But unlike Kafka’s surveyor or Murnane’s filmmaker, Prescott’s narrator is a writer who claims to be researching ‘a book about the disappearing towns in the Central West region of New South Wales’. These towns ‘had not deteriorated economically, its residents had not flocked to the closest regional towns in search of work, the buildings had not been dismantled’. Instead, they had ‘simply disappeared’. When this project fails, he decides to write a history of the town he now lives in, in the hope of uncovering its ‘essence’.

The town’s inhabitants have a curious relationship with their history. According to the local librarian, ‘Nothing of note has ever happened in this town, and by the time it does, there will no longer be any point in remembering it ... No one remembers how it got here, or why the presumed founders built it ...’ If it does have a significant history, the townspeople have since forgotten or wilfully expunged it.

The town is positioned somewhere between a coastal city and the deep interior – rural with a suburban flavour – with its outer region bordered by a mysterious shimmering ‘edge’. The main street is dotted with corporate franchises, and the ‘tentacle roads’ of the outer districts house ‘normal’ people who are nostalgic for an obscure past, own multiple cars, drink heavily, and resent outsiders.

Shortly after her son, Luke, was murdered by his father, Rosie Batty spoke of the non-discriminatory nature of family violence: ‘No matter how nice your house is, how intelligent you are. It can happen to anyone, and everyone.’ If Batty’s is an example of the less easily imagined site of domestic violence, Anna Spargo-Ryan’s second novel, The Gulf, presents us with a more conventional alternative: a disadvantaged environment, a mother (Linda) who loses herself in each man she encounters, and her children, Skye and Ben, who pick up the slack. But when Linda meets Jason, a shady bloke in ‘import–export’, and the three move from Adelaide to his home in ‘shithole’ Port Flinders, incipient violence turns overt, erratic mothering becomes neglect, and Skye is forced to protect herself and Ben, and to make decisions that will affect them all.

By creating a stereotypically dysfunctional scenario, setting it out immediately – with impressive economy – and making sixteen-year-old Skye the narrator, Spargo-Ryan averts a deep consideration of moral and psychological ambiguity in domestic abuse – what brings a perpetrator to this point? How might a partner collude with him or her? Shades of grey are reserved for Skye and her young half-brother, with other characters generally broad-brushed good, or not. Linda’s compulsion to impress Jason through a desperate kind of subservience, for instance, is unexamined and unequivocal. It is also frighteningly funny:

Jason whispered into his phone. Mum buzzed around him, sweeping and straightening. She bought a vacuum cleaner from Kmart and pushed that around him too, picking up dust that hadn’t had time to accumulate yet.
‘Linda,’ he said, ‘can you fucking not?’ and pointed at his ear.
‘I’ll put it on eBay,’ she said, and sat next to him on the couch with her hand on his knee.

The characters in Melanie Cheng’s collection of short stories are all outsiders or misfits in some way. Some feel conspicuously out of place, such as the Lebanese immigrant Maha, in ‘Toy Town’, who is struggling with suburban Australian life, or the Chinese medical student Stanley, who is visiting the family farm of a friend in the titular story. Stanley freezes when he is asked at dinner to nominate his AFL team: he has never watched a game of football in his life. Other characters feel isolated owing to their beliefs or temperament.

Lucien Gracq, the hero of Brian Castro’s verse novel Blindness and Rage, wishes to be a writer, though he has written only love letters to women, which achieved tragicomic results, or none at all. When Gracq retires from his job as a town planner in Adelaide, it seems he will have the time and freedom to write the epic he has dreamed of, but he is diagnosed with terminal cancer and given fifty-three days to live, enough time, perhaps, to compose something worthwhile. But Gracq must overcome a more fundamental problem: he is terrified of leaving his mark upon the blank page, and on the world.

Gracq moves to Paris and joins a secret society of experimental writers Le club des fugitifs, who erase their names from their works, bequeathing them to others so as to reject the tyranny of authorship: both the distorting fame it bestows upon the writer, and the misinterpretation of texts it invites: ‘plagiarism in reverse’ says the group’s leader, Georges Crêpe (the surname an anagram for Perec), ‘to provide a cleansing service before oblivion’.

The minutiae and messiness of family life as it comes together and unravels time and time again are delicately rendered in Tracy Farr’s second novel, The Hope Fault. The unrelenting rain that forms the lugubrious backdrop for much of the novel conjures up the same rich, atmospheric setting of the late Georgia Blain’s Between a Wolf and a Dog (2016), and suffuses the story with a sense of foreboding.

Farr’s five adult characters journey to an old seaside holiday house, peripheral to their existence yet laden with meaning, to prepare it for sale. The chief protagonist, Iris, sweeps through the house with her son Kurt, her niece Luce, her ex-husband Paul, his second wife Kristin, and their newly born child. A looming spectre is Iris’s mother, Rosa, an ailing matriarch living out her days in a retirement home.

The Movement was a secret organisation which radically reduced the power of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) within the union movement during the 1940s and 1950s. Initiated by B.A. Santamaria, the Movement was very active in several Australian states and worked with the general knowledge and approval of key Catholic Church bishops. The Movement (or the Show) ultimately aimed to steer the Australian Labor Party (ALP) towards Catholic political aims. The ALP split in the mid to late 1950s was partly the result of the sectarian tensions exacerbated by the Movement’s activities. Following pressure from the Vatican, the Movement’s formal links with the Catholic church ended in late 1957. The Movement’s work continued with the creation of the National Civic Council (NCC), although as the decades progressed, its relevance and impact on Australian public life gradually faded.

Mark Aarons (with John Grenville) has produced an intriguing new study of Santamaria’s Movement, based on careful study of archival sources and the information and insights of labour movement figures and Santamaria associates. The focus of the study is less on Santamaria’s ideas and policies, and more on the Movement’s strategies for weakening the grip of CPA members on the labour movement, with some emphasis on the election of union officials. As the authors skilfully detail, in working to defeat communist influence in the industrial arena, the Movement gathered much intelligence (some dubious) on CPA figures which was shared with official intelligence agencies such as ASIO.

‘The obscurest epoch is today.’

Robert Louis Stevenson, Across the Plains (1892)

A book that attempts to predict the course of contemporary affairs is always a dangerous enterprise. Events, political events, in particular, have a way of turning like the proverbial worm. Brexit and the election of President Trump are simply the latest and most shocking examples of just how wrong social forecasting can be. James Kirchick’s The End of Europe: Dictators, demagogues, and the coming Dark Age does not hold back in its predictive potential. The end of Europe, Kirchick declares, is upon us. This is a statement, not a question. But this is not the end of Europe as an institution or the demise of the continent. This is Europe, to paraphrase Scotty from Star Trek, but not as we know it.

One way to interpret the overall thesis of this book is to read it as yet another rejection of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history thesis. The end of Europe for Kirchick would be the return of history, but a history, so dark, so bleak, and so Hobbesian in form that we should all be doing everything we can to forestall its coming. In this sense, despite all of his pessimism, Kirchick’s book is a call to arms on behalf of Europe, not the pronouncement of its death.

Nick Brodie, a medievalist and ‘professional history nerd’, enjoys writing in a revelatory tone. His latest book, The Vandemonian War: The secret history of Britain’s Tasmanian invasion, claims to unveil ‘for the first time’ the ‘real story’ of the Tasmanian conflict in the 1820s and 1830s known as the Black War or the Vandemonian War. It is an argument against the generations of historians who have ‘failed to see through the myths and lies’ about Tasmania’s intensely militarised past. These nameless individuals, he contends, neglected crucial documents about the invasion – ‘even when they knew of them’. The real Vandemonian War remained hidden, Brodie argues – ‘until now’.

The basis for Brodie’s claim is his ‘discovery’ of the inbound and outbound correspondence from the Colonial Secretary’s Office in the Tasmanian Archives and Heritage Office in Hobart, designated CSO1/1/320 and CSO41/1/1 (7578). Brodie seems to be unaware of Tasmanian Aboriginal curator Julie Gough’s ongoing project to transcribe the ‘7578’ files and to publish them online; he brushes over the extensive study of part of the ‘7578’ archive offered by N.J.B. Plomley in Friendly Mission (1966); and he declines to engage with the work of the ‘tiny fraction’ of historians who have breathed meaning and insight into this archive over recent decades. Indeed, he dispenses with this rich vein of scholarship in his first two footnotes and does not refer to the work of a single contemporary scholar in the text. Instead, he embarks on a fine-grained discussion of the primary source material: the troop orders, mission reports, and arms catalogues that ‘capture history as it happened’.

The Vandemonian War certainly brings a wealth of rich material on frontier violence into the public domain, yet it will be difficult for most readers to discern what is new here, as Brodie claims that everything he has uncovered is new. ‘Everyone will be shocked,’ he warns at the start of his grand exposition: ‘Whole societies were deliberately obliterated. And genocide, I have come to realise, can be a starched white-collar crime.’

The book provides a detailed account of the military logistics in Tasmania between 1828 and 1832. Brodie’s characters are administrators, militiamen, paramilitary parties, regimental soldiers, mercenaries, brigadiers, commanders, sergeants, corporates, privates, special forces, and ‘Aboriginal auxiliaries’. He translates the conflict into the language of war, describing the various tactical strategies, pincer movements, and intelligence operations undertaken by the British. He even playfully opens one chapter with the line, ‘All was relatively quiet on the western front in early winter 1830.’ This embrace of the genre of military history underlines his core argument about the Vandemonian War: the conflict was industrial and intensely militaristic, but has been ‘de-militarised’ in popular memory ‘in favour of a narrative focused on sporadic skirmishes’.

The relentless blow-by-blow description of the individual campaigns is successful in conveying the systematic attempts by the British military and paramilitary to ‘harass Aboriginal people into surrender or degrade them into annihilation’. And the fact that Brodie hews so close to his sources will make the book a valuable resource to other scholars seeking easy access to this fragile archive. The sources provide a fascinating window on the transitory world of the frontier, and they are sometimes enriched by a discussion of the layered nature of the archive. In January 1830, for example, Richard Tyrrell reported an encounter with two Aboriginal people roasting kangaroo by their fires near the highland lakes. Suspecting others would be nearby, Tyrrell felt ‘reluctantly obliged to fire at the Two’. The Colonial Secretary later underlined this phrase, writing a single word in the margin of the report: ‘why?’ It is a revealing glimpse of puzzlement.

A lithographic reproduction of 'Governor Davey's Proclamation to the Aborigines' (Wikimedia Commons)But the question of ‘why?’ remains unanswered in The Vandemonian War. Brodie gives little consideration to the intent behind the repeated missions, aside from broad statements about conquest and genocide. What was the purpose of the policy of ‘conciliation’? Was it simply, as he suggests, another word for ‘ethnic cleansing’? What of the humanitarian rhetoric, even genuine concern, expressed by colonial leaders? This is where some dialogue with other scholars – such as Lyndall Ryan, Henry Reynolds, James Boyce, Nicholas Clements, Fae Dussart, Murray Johnson, Tom Lawson, Alan Lester, Ian McFarlane, and Rebe Taylor – would have strengthened the analysis.

There is also remarkably little space given to the Aboriginal people against whom this war was waged. What strategies did Aboriginal people employ to resist the ‘mass military mobilisation’? Brodie struggles to move beyond the documentary record, instead lamenting that ‘The surviving Aboriginal people of Van Diemen’s Land mostly died in exile and the Vandemonian War disappeared from public memory with them.’ Nevertheless, he claims credit for highlighting the ‘complex spectrum of inter-cultural interactions that has been too often overlooked in Vandemonian history’, adding, tautologically, ‘But cultural exchanges often went two ways.’

If framed differently, The Vandemonian War might have become another important contribution to the so-called ‘history wars’, for it makes a strong case for the Tasmanian frontier to be viewed through the lens of formal warfare. Yet Brodie only makes a single veiled reference to the charged debate, and in doing so he groups both sides together, dismissing it as a fight over ‘different versions of the same lie’. It is only now, he asserts, that the ‘lie’ of sporadic skirmishes has been vanquished: the Vandemonian War was more warlike, more orchestrated, and more horrific than anyone ever thought or believed – until Brodie wrote this breathless military history.

For the past few years, teaching at the Australian National University, I have asked first year politics students whether they would personally consider joining a political party. The question usually produces a few enthusiastic Labor activists, one or two Greens members, and the odd brave Young Liberal. Once, a student flirted with the Sex Party. But the overwhelming majority, though intelligent and socially engaged, find the suggestion distasteful. In three years, the total rarely exceeded five per cent of the cohort.

Academic studies, both local and international, usually tell a similar story. Peter Mair, a political scientist and expert on party systems, claimed that advanced democracies were now experiencing ‘democracy without a demos ... [with] the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics’. As Mair found in his final book, Ruling The Void (2013), major parties were eroding on almost every front, with fewer members, less ongoing social loyalties, and declining lifelong voting patterns. As a result, elections were more volatile, built as they were on softer, shifting sand.

These changes have produced a persistent anxiety in Australian politics, at least since Kevin Rudd’s first demise in 2010. A procession of prime ministers, the rise and fall of micro parties, the reappearance of One Nation; politics is in flux. For pessimistic observers, it feels like the system is moving in a more uncertain, less productive, perhaps even ‘broken’ direction.

The president of the United States looms large in contemporary politics, a powerful figure dominating news and popular culture: from newly elected president Donald Trump bestriding (or, depending on your political leanings, besmirching) the world stage, to Kevin Spacey as the Machiavellian Frank Underwood in House of Cards. For the modern observer, it is difficult to imagine an era in which the US president was not a significant global figure. The transformation of the president across the course of the twentieth century is a fascinating narrative, one that is well documented in William E. Leuchtenburg’s The American President: From Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Leuchtenburg has devoted a lifetime to chronicling the presidency, most notably a series of works on Franklin Delano Roosevelt that remain set texts for understanding the transformation of executive power in the first half of the twentieth century. The American President represents a rigorous and highly readable capstone to a remarkable academic career.

Leuchtenburg begins with the transfer of power from the assassinated William McKinley to Vice President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901. McKinley’s re-election campaign in 1900 had a number of important firsts, including the use of filmed footage of the president as part of promotional efforts. But the addition of Roosevelt to the ticket, in an attempt by Republican powerbrokers to sideline him from his reforming governorship of New York, made the greatest mark on the future of the presidency. Influential GOP insider Mark Hanna was furious, stating: ‘What is the matter with all of you? Don’t any of you realize that there’s only one heartbeat between that damn cowboy and the presidency?’ McKinley’s death at the hands of anarchist Leon Czolgosz showed Hanna’s warning to be prophetic. Roosevelt, who switched easily between rough-riding frontier cowboy and the New York aristocrat, captivated not just the United States but the world: the first president who was a media personality as much as a political leader. He possessed, as one contemporary put it, a ‘singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter – the quality that medieval theology ascribed to God – he was pure act’. Roosevelt’s willingness to use the government to intervene in the domestic sphere, particularly regarding regulation of the trusts and monopolies of the robber barons, heralded a major shift in both the perception and the reality of what the federal government and the president could do. In the foreign sphere, his peace deal between Russia and Japan in 1907 led to him being the only sitting US president until Barack Obama to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But Roosevelt’s desire to make the United States a global power sowed the seeds of later US foreign policy, best exemplified in the decision he made in 1907, without consulting Congress, to dispatch the Great White Fleet around the world, a stunning display of US naval might. The idea of the United States as a global power broker continued into the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, whose idealistic attempts to form a more integrated global community were shattered on the rocks of an obstinate Senate.

First, a quibble. In the first paragraph of his introduction, John Connor writes that few Australians could ‘name a significant figure of the Australian Army’, John Monash and Simpson (and his donkey) aside. I am less sure. A generation after his death, Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop remains a familiar name. Two of the past three governors-general, including the incumbent, served in the highest ranks of the army. The governor of New South Wales is David Hurley, another former general. David Morrison had not long retired as head of the army when he was named 2016 Australian of the Year. Ben Roberts-Smith, Australia’s most highly decorated living soldier, is chairman of the National Australia Day Council. In recent years, Australians have moved closer to Americans in their veneration of all things military, and with this development the nation’s bravest and most senior soldiers spend more time in the public eye. The army does not want for attention in modern Australia.

This book presents potted biographies of the ‘shadow men’, ten high-ranking soldiers who were influential in shaping the form and character of the Australian army, but whose careers are largely forgotten. Some lurk deeper in the shadows than others. Students of Australian history may know of William Bridges, who helped found the Royal Military College (Duntroon) in Canberra and who in 1915 was shot dead at Gallipoli; most probably will not have heard of Edward Hutton, who moulded the forces of the six Australian colonies into a national army. The editors have chosen their subjects well. The ten ‘shadow men’ include officers whose influence was exerted away from the battlefield, while the fact the biographies cover the period from the time of Federation to the end of the Vietnam War is a pleasing reminder that Australian military history is more than Gallipoli and Kokoda. I did not expect to learn so much about early twentieth-century Australia.

In A Room of One’s Own (1929), Virginia Woolf instructs women to ‘write calmly’ and ‘not in a rage’. Commentator Catherine Fox writes ‘calmly’ about contemporary realities with great potential to spark rage.

Stop Fixing Women operates partly as a rejoinder to Sheryl Sandberg’s popular manifesto Lean In (2013), which addressed ‘internal obstacles’ for women. Fox’s argument is that women’s workplace conditions are not rapidly changing and, on some levels, are regressing. Furthermore, mainstream rhetoric around this issue blames women, albeit sometimes subtly, for their predicament. Fox contends that this displays fallacious reasoning, ‘How can women be both the problem and the solution when they make up just under half the workforce but still a tiny minority of decision makers?’

I lie on the couch
like a beaten dog
as Philip Mould advances
on his latest art forensics
and there are these absolutely
free and liberated daubs
of greens and browns
in close-up on the screen.
They are of the earth
in a surprising and counter way
to all that sateen, country houses,
rich people by the yard.
And from my beaten dog pose
I potentially fall in love with Gainsborough.
How could I have not before?

Philip Mould’s suit combos are impeccable.
He is always consulting experts,
always moving crisply through the
weak light of investigation sites
– the galleries – but his eyes
look infinitely tired
as if he has done so much
looking for us.
I trust his close-ups.

After enough experts
and trailing about,
there is Gainsborough again
with his louche letters
and unsympathetic wife,
his treatment of waistcoats
and his small garden tray arrangements
that look touchingly a lot
like the moss tray gardens
of childhood
only more elaborate
with water features
and places to arrange a nymph or two,
a satyr.
They are a step up from what one
could get at the model shops,
though proximate, small feathery trees
and a brittle feeling of those bags
full of fake glittering lawn.

It leaves me unaccountably sad
that Gainsborough had to live with someone
who threw out all his dirty letters.
What a loss Philip Mould’s prim side-kick
says off-guard, says passionately,
as the camera hovers over the tray garden
– this little grave of creativity –
and she’s right.

Lucy Dougan

Lucy Dougan’s poem will appear in the 2017 Western Australian States of Poetry anthology.

What shocks me, as I consider this important new book, is how completely John Bolton has disappeared from the public mind. Just consider, he pioneered extragalactic radio astronomy, built two superb radio telescopes, was worthy of a Nobel Prize, hired or mentored a generation of top scientists – and was played by Sam Neill in the film The Dish (2000). Neill’s character was not called Bolton in the Working Dog movie, but co-producer Jane Kennedy and co-writer and director Rob Sitch ensured that Neill saw plenty of photographs of the Parkes director and knew of his firm but enterprising leadership style.

I remember Bolton as a thrillingly informal Yorkshireman – no nonsense, foot up on a gate post as he rolled yet another slim cigarette, recounting yarns of staggering achievement or woeful mishap. His store was inexhaustible. ‘You know what happened with Apollo 13?’ he asked me, lighting another fag. ‘They had the front of the rocket bolted to the floor in the shed at NASA and someone lifted it with a crane. Without undoing the bolts fixing it to the floor! About eleven systems in the module got broken. They fixed all but two.’ It was the temperature control for one of the tanks that went wonky on the flight. ‘Houston, we have a problem!’ There was an explosion. As we saw in the film starring Tom Hanks, it was a combination of brilliant calculation to change the course home plus true grit that got the crew safely back to Earth. But it was Bolton’s casual indiscretion telling the story that has always stayed with me.

Along time ago in a university far, far away, I received an application for graduate study in psychology. The applicant claimed to have no particular orientation to the field, just a broad and open-minded curiosity. In her own words, she was a ‘tabula rosa’: a rose tablet. The student had misrendered John Locke’s famous tabula rasa, the empiricist metaphor of the human mind as a blank slate on which experience writes knowledge. This rose by another name smells of nothing at all.

Mariano Sigman’s The Secret Life of the Mind is an attempt to unLocke cognition. The ruling idea behind this entertaining book is ‘the quest to make human thought transparent’, and it does so by revealing some of the preconceptions, predispositions, and brain mechanisms that enable our mental capabilities. Sigman, an Argentine neuroscientist whose high public profile has been crowned by a popular TED Talk, brings ideas from philosophy, education, linguistics, behavioural economics, and computer science to his task of discrediting the tabula rasa.

Writing on the origins of mind, for example, Sigman argues that we come into the world furnished with more cognitive powers than most of us realise. Although they may give the appearance of being incapable blobs, infants have primordial ideas of number, the persistence of objects after they have been hidden from view, and even morality. Six-month-old babies prefer to look at shapes that help rather than hinder a struggling triangle in a geometric morality play, and they have an ability to distinguish speech sounds that adults lose if their language does not employ them. In both cases, infants come pre-equipped with sophisticated mental capacities rather than merely learning from scratch. As Sigman writes, ‘the brain is not a blank page on which things are written, but rather a rough surface on which some shapes fit and some don’t’.

It stands to reason, apparently, that universities are inefficient creatures that need ever more market discipline and corporate responsiveness to fulfil their potential. After all, what is education but an industry, and British industry is plainly more successful than British universities. Or perhaps not. Stefan Collini points acerbically to the fact that British industry (with its mixed record) has for decades been held up as a template for the transformation of Britain’s world-leading universities. Why do we think like this? Why don’t we instead require banks to restructure along the lines of universities?

Collini’s is a very British book, yet the story he tells is eerily resonant in Australia. Often, we got there first. And ‘there’ is a collective loss of nerve in the value of education and research as something broader than a strict accounting of dollar value to individuals and the economy. I simply do not get up every morning singing the Flinders University song and burning with a desire to lift our place in global rankings. My commitments are to educating students in the richness of literature, to researching interesting and meaningful things in culture, and to participating in a collegial world of scholars. Were I properly motivated by profit and prestige, I would have stuck with that Law degree I abandoned in 1982. Education is full of pitiful victims of false-consciousness like me. It wouldn’t work without us.

‘Great wits to madness sure are near allied,
And thin partitions do their bounds divide.’

For no one were Dryden’s partitions thinner than for Robert Lowell, as Kay Redfield Jamison’s exploration of the links between his work and the manic depressive illness which dogged him for most of his life makes clear. Previous biographers have, with varying degrees of compassion and opprobrium, chronicled the chaos and hurt caused by his manic outbursts. These echoed the reactions of his friends, partners, and acquaintances, which ranged from W.H. Auden’s nannyish, purse-lipped disapproval to Elizabeth Hardwick’s hard-won, loving, patient understanding. No previous writer on Lowell, however, has attempted to show the effect of manic depression on his life and work from the inside, as it were.

Jamison is dauntingly qualified to take this approach. The Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, she is also an honorary professor of English at the University of St Andrews. She is the author of An Unquiet Mind (1995), a forthright account of her own struggles with manic depression, and Touched With Fire (1993), a comprehensive exploration of the links between mania and creativity. In Setting the River on Fire, she has written a fascinating, if sometimes uneasy, amalgam of case history, literary biography, and medical chronicle.

Paul Muldoon’s friend and mentor, the late Seamus Heaney, once remarked that reading Muldoon was like being in a room with two informants: one a compulsive liar and one who always tells the truth. The trick, Heaney suggested, is ‘trying to formulate a question that will elicit an answer from either one that can be reliably decoded’.

Muldoon’s poems are renowned for their sleight of hand, for saying one thing then offering alternatives to whatever it is that a word or image has provoked. If variety of ideas and theme can make for engaging poetry, Muldoon has made association his own, inimitable domain. For readers new to his work, this can be unsettling. Expecting immediate accessibility and transparency can lead to frustration. One way of negotiating the tricky terrain Muldoon has mapped, often without scale, is to go along for the ride, to enjoy the scenic route with a guide who may or may not be offering a reliable commentary on what’s encountered along the way. Muldoon has been accused of being wilfully obscure, but this is harsh, as it overlooks the poet’s own admission that language can be unpredictable and spontaneous, despite the resulting work being the product of an intense editorial resolve.

Two recent collections by two very different voices have both been ‘blurbed’ as works of fragmentation. In her début collection, Cassie Lewis is described as speaking for ‘a generation whose ambitions and emotions have become very fractured and fragmented’. Eddie Paterson’s new book is full of redacted texts of digital trash and treasure; it is a blacked-out, cut-up collage of the textual chatter of our ‘post-digital existence’. The lyric voice of The Blue Decodes, however, is less fracture and fragment, and more a compelling portrait of an alert mind in tension with itself. redactor is composed of censored, dismembered, remembered emails, memos, text messages, and webfeeds. While this might qualify as ‘uncreative writing’, in that its conceit is seemingly the inverse of the personal lyric, it, too, is a portrait of the artist reading, absorbing, repelling, mocking, and finding delight in a weird, flat, bewildering multiverse of screens where poems are being written all the time.

The idea of hopefulness is central to Lewis’s collection, which has been twenty years in the making. Images of the sacred and the profane, temple and town, host an oscillating meditation on the notion of hope. Sometimes hope is the unclaimed joys of youth, ‘a memory of happiness you couldn’t use’; sometimes hope is cast as an oddly watchful force exerting pressures on human follies and wounds. Lewis’s day job as a nurse is subtly evident in images of the rawness and brutality of the human work of being in the world. Other times, the collection’s voice finds itself in a stand-off with its central preoccupation: ‘What would hope do to me if I couldn’t stare it out?’ The poems’ speakers and characters betray longing for the transcendence that ritual or worship might provide, but this is a book of irreverent religious feeling, not of religion or religiosity. The exchange of forces that religion promises is often sought and found in the act of writing poetry: ‘Between the page and the eye is where the power happens.’

On the acknowledgments page of this vast compendium, Christopher Prendergast describes the creation of the work as an ‘arduous task’ and the book itself as an ‘unwieldy vessel’. One can sympathise with the difficulty of presenting as a history of five centuries of French literature what would more accurately be described as a chronological anthology of essays by more than thirty different scholars; but few historians would accept Prendergast’s introductory affirmation that his ‘collection of glimpses, angled and partial snapshots ... is all history can ever be’.

A second introduction, by David Coward, provides a firmer historical context for the essay collection, tracing the development of French cultural distinctiveness across time: the gradual spread of the hegemony of the French language; the rise of the ‘author’ and the ‘intellectual’; and the evolution of readership from a tiny percentage of literate upper-class people to a mass audience. Coward outlines the complexities associated with the arrival of the printing press and the impact of various censorship regimes, and offers a history of literary criticism and an analysis of how French literature today, like any other, faces the challenges of the digital age. He does indeed provide what Prendergast calls ‘the arc of a story centred on the nexus of language, nation and modernity’.

Ashleigh Young is one of a number of writers currently distinguishing themselves as the latest generation to emerge from the creative writing program at Victoria University in Wellington. The course, founded by Bill Manhire in 1975, maintains the supply of excellence that attracted so much resentment as its ‘spectacular babies’ – from Barbara Anderson to Eleanor Catton – carried off the prizes and earned international praise.

Five of the eight categories in this year’s Ockham New Zealand Book Awards were taken by VUP authors, among them Hera Lindsay Bird, whose eponymous volume won Best First Book for Poetry. ‘Keats is dead so fuck me from behind,’ sings Bird, a long way from the austere feminist politics of Dinah Hawken in the 1990s. Yet one observation about VUP writers has been that they have made poetry ‘unpoetic’. If Bird confirms this, Young reverses it, making the personal essay a work of resonant literary art. Can You Tolerate This? took both the Ockham non-fiction award and Yale University’s Windham–Campbell Prize.