First, I need to visit Dean Nicolle’s eucalypt arboretum. Four hundred rows of trees, four specimens of each species of Eucalyptus, Corymbia, and Angophora (the eucalypts) nestled together, sharing pollen and landscape, dropping limbs in the grass. Each group of trees is a result of the previous year’s fieldwork. The year 2000 was big: Nicolle this keeper of the keys to the eucalypts spent six months in Western Australia collecting seed.

But before my visit to the arboretum, there is a more personal detour to the adjacent Currency Creek cemetery. Here, my great-great-great-grandfather and -mother, asleep in the arms of God since 1901, Section: General, Niche:123, Permit/Lease: 357. It takes half an hour to find them, but here they are, under an old blue gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon), their headstone replaced with a small block of concrete and a plaque giving them some sort of identity.

As we search the rows, four white gums collected from the Mallee. E. gracilis, from west of Blyth. Content to sit with family, on this hillside, so far from home. Forgotten, perhaps, but then again, I had never got around to visiting Andrew Darling Orr (I apologise for taking so long). Arriving in South Australia from Glasgow in 1867, Andrew settled in nearby Goolwa, building wooden boats. And his wife, Catherine what can I know about her? Excepting some Who Do You Think You Are? experience, something like accompanying Dean up and down the rows, from box to ironbark, lemon scented to river reds; from Cape York to Hobart.

‘What about Lenin do you admire most?’ Catherine Merridale, author of Lenin on the Train (2016), answered as most historians would: ‘I can’t think of anything much to admire.’  That this question could be asked at all in 2017 shows that the Russian Revolution continues to fascinate. Such continuities with the mental world of the Cold War are no speciality of the political left, but they rely on nearly heroic efforts to simplify an incredibly complex historical reality.

No amount of modelling or scientific assessment can foresee the full extent of the damage that will eventuate if the Adani Group’s Carmichael Coal Mine goes ahead. It would be the largest coal mine ever built in Australia and amongst the biggest in the world, extended over a thirty-kilometre-long area and comprising six open cut pits and five underground mines. An estimated 2.3 billion tonnes of coal would be removed over the sixty years of its operation. The Galilee Basin wouldn’t know what had hit it.

Humans are narrative creatures. We tell stories to make sense of ourselves, but our stories – be they historical, political, fictional, or personal – shape us as much as we shape them. In the service of narrative expediency, we often sacrifice nuance. We turn chance to prophecy, and accidents into choices. We justify and excuse ourselves. We anoint heroes and villains. As novelist Michelle de Kretser warns, it is ‘frighteningly easy’ to turn the people around us into characters and to forget that: ‘The only life in which you play a leading role is your own.’ De Kretser’s new novel, The Life to Come, cleverly exposes the perils of narrative egocentrism by refusing to create a centre. Rather, she splits the book into five distinct sections that overlay rather than interconnect, and in which human complexity is privileged over narrative simplicity.

Yes we can!

Confirmation of the legality of the marriage equality postal survey by the High Court of Australia prompted us to invite a number of leading writers, artists, directors, scholars, lawyers, and public figures to sign an Open Letter encouraging Australians to vote Yes. The response was positive and prompt.

What can be too easily overlooked or obscured here is the simplicity of the Yes case. All the LGBT community and its myriad supporters are seeking is the same right that obtains for heterosexuals: the freedom to marry if they so choose. No more, no less. Ed.

Urgent times

Few advanced, wealthy, secular societies have found this issue so fraught. Soon, happily, this matter will be behind us, and government and citizens will be able to get on on with the important issues confronting this society, especially climate change, the urgency of which is attested to by several contributors to our Environment issue.

Eucalypt Australia has supported this third annual Environment issue. Together with the ABR Patrons, Eucalypt Australia has funded Adelaide writer Stephen Orr’s ABR Eucalypt Fellowship. His essay is titled ‘Ambassadors from Another Time’. We review a number of books on climate change, sustainability, and environmentalism. We also invited some noted writers and environmentalists to nominate the book that has had the biggest influence on them from an environmental point of view.

Special thanks to our guest editor, Professor Tom Griffiths, and to Philip Jones of the South Australian Museum, a recent ABR Fellow, who curated the photo essay.

Calibre Essay Prize

For the twelfth year in a row, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. The Prize is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. Both essays will appear in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world.

Michael Adams won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize for 'Salt Blood', which appeared in the June-July issue of ABRThe judges on this occasion are novelist/essayist Andrea Goldsmith, NewSouth publisher Phillipa McGuinness, and ABR Editor Peter Rose.

We recommend the quick, inexpensive online entry system. Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries will close on 15 January 2018. All previous Calibre-winning essays are available online, including Michael Adams’s celebrated ‘Salt Blood’, which won the 2017 Calibre Essay Prize.

We thank Colin Golvan QC (Chair of ABR) and the ABR Patrons for enabling us to present Calibre in this lucrative form.

John Ashbery (1927–2017)

John Ashbery, a revered figure in American poetry, died on 3 September, weeks after his ninetieth birthday. His oeuvre was huge, soulful, teasing, technically brilliant, and profoundly witty. W.H. Auden chose Ashbery’s first collection, Some Trees (1956) as the winner of the Yale Younger Poets Prize. Sixty years later, he published Commotion of the Birds.

To coincide with his ninetieth birthday, Farrar, Straus & Giroux published Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s early life. Publishers always claim that biographies are transformative, and in this case it’s true. Karin Roffman had access to the early diaries and correspondence – and to the poet himself. Now we know how beguilingly and persistently autobiographical many of the poems are.

Peter Rose and John Ashbery, 1992

Ashbery’s renown in Australia was enduring, and his influence extensive. In its early years, the Melbourne Writers’ Festival often featured major world poets, and John Ashbery’s visit in 1992 was a highlight. He gave superb readings in Melbourne and Sydney. Our Editor recalls interviewing the poet at the Malthouse Theatre – not the easiest assignment, for Ashbery was a famously sceptical, though affable, interviewee. Next day, MWF took Ashbery and other guests to a rather chilly Ballarat. On the bus, Ashbery offered to entertain his colleagues (August Kleinzahler among them) with Gracie Fields tunes. It was a memorable week for those who loved the poetry and were charmed by the man himself.

To celebrate John Ashbery’s life and poetry, a number of poets will read at Collected Works Bookshop on Friday, 20 October (6 for 6.30 pm). The readers are Gig Ryan, Michael Farrell, Judith Bishop, John Hawke, Ann Vickery, Kris Hemensley, David Dick, and Peter Rose. This is a free event.

Vale Agnes Nieuwenhuizen

ABR was saddened to learn that Agnes Niuewenhuizen, who was a tireless advocate for YA literature and young readers, died last week. Agnes established the Youth Literature Program and later the Centre for Youth Literature at the State Library of Victoria in 1991. After her retirement in 2005 she focused on reviewing adult fiction, memoirs, and works on reading, as well as the occasional YA book. She was also an ABR contributor.

Free gift subscription

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All you have to do is fill in the back of the flysheet that accompanies the print issue, or contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. (quoting your subscriber number please). We will contact the nominated recipient (thus we will need the recipient’s email address). Please note that online-only subscribers are entitled to direct online subscriptions. Terms and conditions apply.

Trust Brio

Relatively new publisher on the block Xoum – formerly in Sydney, now based in Melbourne – has changed its name to Brio Books and has been reissuing some fine Australian titles, including Gail Bell’s The Poison Principle (2001) and Gavin Souter’s Sydney Observed (1965). There is a new suite of five books by Robert Dessaix, including the inimitable A Mother’s Disgrace (1994), which ends with those dangerous words: ‘I have told you the truth. Now trust me.’

The Call of the Reed Warbler is a brutally honest book – an account of personal redemption following generations of sin. The only comparable work I know of is Rian Malan’s great saga of South Africa, My Traitor’s Heart (1990) – revolutionary, threatening, and the traducing efforts of an insider. Malan, a relative of the architect of apartheid, South African Prime Minister Daniel Malan, was an anti-apartheid revolutionary. My Traitor’s Heart cost him his family, society, almost his life. The Call of the Reed Warbler, one intuits, has cost Monaro farmer and author Charles Massy almost as dearly.

These may seem to be large claims for a book which, at one level, consists mostly of case studies of Australian farmers struggling for economic and environmental sustainability. But the reality behind the work is revealed through Google Earth: if you search for the properties mentioned in the book, you will find oases of green surrounded by that parched devastation we have come to think of as the normal state of Australian agricultural lands. The stark comparison begs the question: why do we continue with morally bankrupt and dangerous ways of doing things, when better alternatives stare us in the face?

How do people cope with drought, not as an abstraction or singular event but as a lifelong trial? In a bid to answer this question, historian Rebecca Jones elevates an understated, if underrated, historical source for understanding human responses to drought: the humble farm diary. Publishers’ enthusiasm for diaries as authentic historical documents and works of fiction seems as strong as the scholarship about diaries is vast. Yet amid the groundswell of interest in recent decades among humanities scholars in addressing ecological issues and crises, Jones’s attention to this particular genre of diary writing is unique. Through diaries, by default, Slow Catastrophes relates the passage of time and the dynamics of lived experience. The longer-term view it offers is critical to understanding the real paradoxes of Australian rural landholding, much like those of drought.

Strikingly, for a country where the effects of landscape have been invoked repeatedly as explanations of character, there was little published on drought as a cultural concept in Australia as recently as the millennium drought. Environmental historians noted in the anthology A Change in the Weather: Climate and culture in Australia (2005) that, in Australian historiography, climate has often been imagined as the ‘backdrop’ against which history played out or culture defined itself. Jones’s major study of Australian experiences of drought is a necessary extension of the field, delving deep into the cultural and historical dimensions of environmental concern.

The Songs of Trees takes its title from something that might not actually happen. Do trees sing? The notion runs through the American biologist David George Haskell’s second book in twisty directions, like a half-caught melody. (His first book was The Forest Unseen, a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2013.)

Don’t trees just make sounds, crackling in the frost, growling in the wind, banging their branches against each other? Isn’t singing what birds and people do, something other than the involuntary reaction of, say, pine needles (in Haskell’s words) as they ‘harrow the wind, fracturing it with thousands of unyielding tines, scoring the air with violent grooves’? Isn’t song more an intelligent, artistic assembly of melody and feeling, a form (even for birds) of heightened, directed speech?

The world is embarking on a journey to a clean energy future. Some places are well on their way; most have barely begun. We will all need to get there eventually. How long it takes comes down to political choices, economic realities, and technological breakthroughs. The consequences of delay are already well known. In Sunlight and Seaweed, Tim Flannery takes a close look at the potential solutions the technological developments that could save us from the most dire consequences of our torrid affair with fossil fuels.

Sunlight and Seaweed is a global story and Flannery gives us the world tour from growing truss tomatoes in the South Australian desert, to ‘3D ocean farming’ in Long Island Sound, to steam cleaning soils in China and cleaning up the Ganges in India. He shows us how technological innovation could drive a happier, healthier, more sustainable future.

Even young trees bear the signature of deep time, if not eternity. For most of humanity’s existence, men and women have looked upwards through trees, wondering at the tracery of their branches piercing the firmament, the domed lid of the earthly world. Recorded mythology confirms that trees have occupied that special place in every ancient belief system; rooted in the terrestrial but reaching into the ethereal beyond.

‘Forget everything you know.’ Clive Hamilton’s book pulls no punches from the first words on the cover. Building on a raft of other pieces he has written on the subject, Hamilton’s book is unsurprisingly provocative, blunt, and confident, its style matching the epic physical, intellectual, and ethical drama that is the Anthropocene.

Although the Anthropocene now needs little introduction, Hamilton begins with the science, ensuring that unlike too many other observers scientists and academics included we don’t misapprehend the Anthropocene as just some new environmental or ecosystem issue. No, the Anthropocene is a game changer, a paradigm shift; a new geological epoch that the Earth is now in due to humans’ aggregate influence changing the way the Earth System functions and pushing it and us into a new, unprecedented ‘operating state’.

Kim Scott

Bill Gammage, in The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines made Australia (2011), shows fire being deployed across the continent with a complexity and skill ‘greater than anything modern Australia has imagined’. He explains why colonists spoke of a land like ‘a gentleman’s park, an inhabited and improved country’. Controlled fire created a ‘mosaic of grass and tree’, of ‘springs, soaks, caches and wetlands’ that channelled, persuaded, and lured prey in predictable ways. Thus Indigenous cultures enabled abundance, and ‘voluminous and intricate’ spiritual and creative practice.

Kim Mahood

My nominated book is The Night Country (1971), by American anthropologist Loren Eiseley. I first encountered Eiseley’s essays in the early 1980s and was transfixed by his capacity to combine the personal, the psychological, the metaphoric, the poetic, and the scientific in prose of imaginative reach and literary beauty. His essay ‘The Creature from the Marsh’, in which he ponders the footprint of a transitional form of human, only to realise that it belongs to him, locates our flawed and aspirational species at the heart of the natural world.

Philip Jones

Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918), written and illustrated by May Gibbs, helped form my childhood notions of the environment. Perhaps there are two reasons. First, Gibbs proposed a connected, self-sustaining world of plants and animals in which humans played a rare but destructive role. Secondly, the book conveyed the idea that the bush harbours wonderful secrets, often on a minute level; one should tread lightly and listen.

Andrea Gaynor

The Death of a Wombat (1972), Ivan Smith’s genre-defying work, emerged from an award-winning 1959 ABC radio program by Smith; Wren Books approached Clifton Pugh to provide illustrations for the book. My great-grandmother gave me a copy for Christmas when I was six years old. I was enthralled by the vulnerable beauty of its outback, and distressed at the human carelessness behind the cataclysmic bushfire that inevitably, agonisingly, claimed so many animals’ lives.

Martin Thomas

Walt Whitman (photograph by Mathew Handy, Wikimedia Commons)‘Now I am terrified at the earth!’ wrote Walt Whitman. ‘It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions.’ These lines, dear to gardeners everywhere, appear in ‘This Compost’, a homily to nature’s capacity for regeneration. Whitman’s attentiveness to the cycles and rhythms of the natural world is a constant inspiration. The cities, as much as the forests and prairies, fuelled his environmental curiosity. ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ is a poem that grows inside you, rocking gently to the tidal flows that underlie the daily commute.

Danielle Clode

It was certainly the books of childhood that germinated my interest in the natural world. But one book stands out: W.J. Dakin’s Australian Seashores, posthumously published in 1952, updated by Isobel Bennett and Elizabeth Pope. For forty years this book has directed my steps along Australia’s coasts, encouraged my first forays into biology, shaped my studies, and inspired my writing every page remains a fascinating dip into a world that lies beneath our feet.

James Bradley

There aren’t many books that I can honestly say have changed my life, but Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams (1986) is one of them. Its luminous prose and hushed reverence for the landscape embody an understanding not just that there are other ways of imagining a landscape and our relationship to it, but of the fact that attentiveness to the particular is an ethical act in itself. It’s an extraordinary, beautiful, transformative book and one I continue to value immensely.

Alan Atkinson

Lately, there has been a wonderful rush of books connecting the old concerns of the Green movement with everything else important to humanity, from Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the climate (2014) to Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable (2017). But note especially Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’ (2015), where questions of environmental damage and social justice are stitched together with geniune awe and, I think, perfect economy.

Ashley Hay

My tipping point was This Overheating World, an edition of Granta edited by Bill McKibben in 2003. Published fourteen years after ‘The End of Nature’, McKibben’s own first mighty global warming article, it embedded this issue in my sense of the world particularly pieces by Philip Marsden and Matthew Hart, and McKibben’s introduction. Fourteen years later again, the sorrow and frustration in that introduction remain shockingly germane. ‘Hardly anyone has fear in their guts,’ McKibben wrote. In some places that’s so, even now, as the planet gets hotter and hotter.

Grace Karskens

A lightbulb moment of discovery came with Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors: The antiquarian imagination in Australia (1996). It’s a brilliant, labyrinthine, landmark book about how Australians imagined and created their histories both human and environmental. Chapter Twelve takes readers into wilderness landscapes and reveals them to be peopled, and storied, after all. Why do conservation campaigns so often deny the intimate relationships between humans and the non-human world? Tom’s phrase ‘bleeding sepia into green’ has stayed with me.

Michael Adams

In Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009), the wild child story pivots around questions of what it means to accept and be accepted by strange others. It navigates the collapse of human care and being, and its replacement by a different, more-than-human, culture and ecology of care and identity, deep in the heart of a heartless city. Dog Boy is an inspirational compass for relocating ourselves in a world of social and environmental unknown unknowns.

Rebe Taylor

Patsy Cameron’s Grease and Ochre: The blending of two cultures at the colonial sea frontier (2011) changed how I saw the Bass Strait islands and how I wrote my last book. Her work taught me that the islands were not just a place where her Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors ‘survived’ due to the early nineteenth-century sealing trade. The environment’s ‘remoteness and wild beauty’, its seasons and resources, shaped the coming together of European and Aboriginal cultures to create a ‘new lifeworld and a new people’.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Barbara York Main’s Between Wodjil and Tor (1967) is a natural history of a small section of remnant bushland in the Western Australian wheatbelt. An eminent zoologist, known for her ground-breaking work on trapdoor spiders, York Main is also a gifted prose stylist possibly the one who comes closest in Australia to the belletristic tradition of American nature writing (Henry David Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard).

Sarah Holland-Batt

‘Somehow it seems sufficient,’ A.R. Ammons once wrote, ‘to see and hear whatever coming and going is losing the self to the victory of stones and trees.’ I think of those lines when I read Judith Beveridge’s inimitable poetry. Beveridge shows us that finding a precise, unflinching language for the natural world and the human place within it can be a profound, reverential, and philosophical act. I especially love her pelagic volume Storm and Honey (2009).

Sophie Cunningham

When I first read Stephen Muecke, Paddy Roe, and Krim Benterrak’s Reading the Country: Introduction to nomadology in 1984, the year of publication, it was a revelation, introducing me to the idea that landscape could speak. What you had to do was learn to listen to it.

John Kinsella

When my brother, an intense naturalist from the age of six, received Vincent Serventy’s book Dryandra: The story of an Australian forest (1970) for his birthday, I couldn’t wait to read it. It made an impression on me, and its passion for place and the natural world stayed with me. In my late twenties, for three years, I lived on and off next to Dryandra Forest with my brother. His knowledge of the forest was broad. We often walked through its south-eastern outskirts, talking of the Serventy book. I couldn’t engage with the many birds, echidnas, kangaroos, and even numbats without being aware of the book’s knowledge. The book that stopped a bauxite mine activist environmental literature at its best!

Tom Griffiths

I read Eric Rolls’s A Million Wild Acres (1981) soon after I returned from my first trip to Europe. It seemed to encapsulate all that is wonderful, earthy, feral, and unruly about my country. Animals, plants, and insects share the stage with humans in this democratic, ecological, cross-cultural saga of life in the Pilliga forest of northern New South Wales. Rolls was a farmer, poet, fisherman, and historian with a lust for life and a deep sense of wonder about the land he farmed. He enchants the landscape and its creatures with exact, spellbinding stories. It is nature writing with a distinctive, compelling Australian accent.

While Australian governments line up to help Adani dig the world’s biggest coal mine, energy experts are burying fossil fuels forever. Dieter Helm is an economist and professor of energy policy at Oxford. Burn Out: The endgame for fossil fuels is his ambitious, provocative, and sometimes perverse take on global energy prospects. Helm sees no future for fossil fuels. However, he sees the coming end of the Age of Coal, Oil, and Gas as complex, drawn-out, and painful.

The challenges for those seeking to decarbonise energy production will be shaped by what Helm calls predictable surprises, their geopolitical consequences, and the changing corporate landscape for energy. The predictable surprises include an end to the three-decade long commodity super-cycle produced by China’s industrialisation and the globalised acceleration of consumption and trade. Yet his prediction of the permanent demise of such growth is questionable. It fails to account for the continued extension of consumption within China or the potential rise of India and Africa (though they are mentioned later in the book) as additional markets and producers. Any one of these could lead to another Long Boom including in energy demand although at huge ecological cost. But this matters little to the rest of his argument.

Zoological gardens are conflicted institutions. They provide a miraculous opportunity for close-ups with exotic and native animals one might never otherwise encounter. Yet they do so by keeping those very animals captive. The creaturely contact that zoos hope and claim can help transform citizens into advocates for animals and the environment is discomfited, if not entirely undermined, by the fact of dominion. Zoo biologists and keepers possess unique knowledge and skill in the breeding and care of wildlife, yet these were earned at the cost of generations of suffering and untimely death, and transform their subjects in still unknown and unacknowledged ways. Thus disquiet has long influenced the public debate over the merits of zoos whether entertainment, education, science, or conservation and their future place in societies is haunted by their role in defaunation and extinction.

Jenny Gray’s Zoo Ethics seeks to confront this disquiet and, by examining a range of ethical frameworks, to consider whether zoos can be justified. Whatever their capacities, she argues, all zoo animals are of moral concern: ‘duties and obligations result from the special relationships that have emerged from the entangled history, shared environment and vulnerability that arises when holding animals in captivity’. As might be expected of the CEO of Zoos Victoria and the incoming president of the world zoo governing body, Gray accepts reformist arguments for animal welfare but denies abolitionist claims of animal rights, in particular to liberty. That is, the ownership and use of animals are acceptable as long as unnecessary pain and suffering (both physical and psychological) are eliminated and each species’ complex needs, desires, and interests are met. In their techniques of care and replication of natural environments, she claims, zoos have made themselves capable of doing so.

With five illustrated field guides, two e-guide apps, and at least three photographic guides available to help people identify birds in Australia, some would question the need for yet another. The first field guide to Australian birds, written and illustrated by renowned bird artist Peter Slater, was published in 1970 and 1974 (two volumes). Since then, new guides have appeared roughly each decade. Given the purpose of field guides, good illustrations of each species are paramount, and these are invariably presented in plates, with a facing page of text pointing out the diagnostic characteristics of each species, and often a map showing where it occurs. Additional information on the species’ appearance, voice, habitat, distribution, and status are often provided in a separate section, and the ratio of such text to illustrated plates varies markedly among field guides around the world. The earlier Australian field guides tended to be overloaded with extraneous information, devoting as little as twenty per cent of their pages to illustrations, while more recent guides both here and overseas have moved towards fifty per cent plates, cramming all the relevant information onto the facing pages. A notable exception is the self-illustrated Michael Morcombe Field Guide to Australian Birds (2000), in which the nests and eggs of almost all Australian-breeding species are described and illustrated, an edifying but completely unnecessary addition to a field guide.

George Pell is the most polarising religious leader Australia has had in recent decades, certainly since Daniel Mannix – perhaps since Samuel Marsden. For most of his career he has been loathed or adored for his sternly inflexible defence of a Catholic orthodoxy predating the second Vatican Council, his robust and sometimes courageous interaction with opponents inside and outside the church, his relentless determination to crush dissent and doubt, often felt as bullying by those responsible to him, and his fierce ambition.

Why do you write?

I am running out of other options.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Yes. I have always been very attached to my dreams, and I am so glad that someone is finally interested in them.

Where are you happiest?

‘Then there was only one: myself.’

John Ashbery, ‘The History of My Life’

Having comprehensively disposed of that chestnut,
shoved it on a skip,
I have more questions to put to you than the Socratic
in our grocer.
First, I want you to step out of those non sequiturs, comely
though they are.
Donate those loafers to the nearest indigent – with a song
in your heart.
Don’t pout. Look what it does to your profile.
Resurrect
the cellphone that bids you how to croon. Pronto!
It knows
where you are. We all do. We know everything about you.
Unnerving
to find the universe is a pertinacious listener,
as perverse.
Remember that summer hit, the ‘Song of Surveillance’?
We hummed along.
Mom thought it the most radical lyric since ‘Always’.
Next question?
How long do we have, and who invited you anyway?
Saturnine:
so easily spooked by all the deaths that happen on a farm.
Must we be?
Who wrote the wretched book anyway, who proofed it?
In my tome
the inscription is not even inked. Pastel dicta.
How proverbial!
Remember that boy who cracked his head in a pond,
the shirtless one
who thrashed you at tennis, beat you repeatedly?
How you rallied.
Anyone can rhapsodise at twilight, oath or blandishment.
Ceaseless tend
the lyrics towards infinity. And when we are eternised,
as the phrase goes,
as we sinners grope towards subterfuge or farce,
only then
the patois, the plenitude of whom we are, only and ever ourselves.

Peter Rose

Peter Rose’s latest poetry collection is The Subject of Feeling (2015).

The many gaps in the verifiable history of Jeanne d’Arc’s early years in rural France, as well as her improbable rise to prominence and martyrdom, have left room for a considerable amount of speculation and projection over the centuries. There is no shortage of fictional or historical accounts of her life, or ways of characterising the Maid’s struggle, but with The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc Ali Alizadeh breathes fresh life into a story that has been retold and re-contextualised over and again.

Alizadeh’s approach hinges on one of the primary gestures of historical fiction. The narrator notes that, ‘Everyone thinks everything has been written about, has been repeated ad infinitum, and there’s nothing left to excavate ...’ before highlighting the contested and unknown elements of Jeanne d’Arc’s legend. In Alizadeh’s account, Jeanne’s miraculous personal and military feats have as much to do with a need for personal liberation from constraints pertaining to her gender, and the nature of her desires, as the need to liberate France from the rule of its English despoilers. While many around her are motivated by the enemy’s cruelty, Jeanne hopes to win the spiritual right to be her true self.

‘No man who is his country’s enemy shall call himself my friend. Of this I am sure.’

Creon, Antigone

‘I did not think your edicts strong enough to overrule the unwritten unalterable laws of God and heaven, you being only a man.’

Antigone, Antigone

Sophocles might not have foreseen when he wrote his tragedy Antigone in 441 BCE that the issues he explored would remain topical in 2017. In the play, Polynices, Antigone’s brother, has died whilst attacking Thebes, his own city, in a bid for the crown. Creon, king of Thebes, has ordered that Polynices’s body be left unburied, ‘to be eaten by dogs and vultures’, and that anyone who contravenes that order should be killed. To leave a loved one unburied was taboo in Ancient Greece; Antigone resolves to defy Creon and bury her brother. The fact that Antigone is betrothed to Creon’s son Haemon complicates matters, and the standoff between the unyielding Antigone and Creon triggers a conflict of epic dimensions. What on one level is a clash between the individual and the state is also a struggle between different generations and genders, and, at a more profound level, between justice and the law, eternal laws and human laws, loyalty to family and to country.

In Harriet McKnight’s début novel, a story about early onset dementia is offset by a second conservation-focused narrative involving the glossy black cockatoo. This braided structure immediately creates anticipation about where and how the two stories will meet.

Pina is the primary carer for her husband, Alan, whose illness now dictates the rhythm of their lives. The illness is erasing Alan’s memory along with his personality as it becomes increasingly difficult for him ‘to keep a grip on what was real and what wasn’t’. Pina is steadfast in her determination to care for him at home, even when his symptoms begin to feel ‘like a personal affront’.

The tagline of Wimmera is ‘Small town. Big secret’. Mark Brandi’s first novel does indeed feature a secret (and a grim one, at that), but it also offers a disturbing insight into Australian masculinity. The book opens in the country circa 1989. Ben and Fab are primary school students who, both misfits, while away the hours catching yabbies, playing cricket, and watching The Wonder Years. Fab’s father is abusive, but they find solace in their friendship. Then Ronnie Bellamy appears in their lives. Ronnie is a ‘tall, muscular’ man who works in the nearby mines. He charms the boys with his friendly demeanour and stash of porn magazines, but he has ulterior motives. Fast-forward to 2006: Fab remains in his childhood town, working menial jobs and drinking excessively. He seems reluctant to confront his past, though a gruesome discovery forces him to do just that.

Every Chris Womersley novel represents a significant departure from the last. Following his award-winning and magnificently dark début, The Low Road (2007), and his Miles Franklin shortlisted Bereft (2010), and Cairo (2013), City of Crows is his first novel set entirely outside Australia. An acutely crafted historical fiction, it is set in France in 1673 during the reign of Louis XIV.

The title refers to a common period name for Paris, although the novel begins outside the city. This movement from the countryside to the metropolis reflects the early structure of the narrative, but also differences in the way that witchcraft was performed between city and country, particularly by the novel’s two protagonists: the peasant Charlotte Picot and the opportunist magician Monsieur Lesage.

Sherlock Holmes, fairly early on in his career, survived an attempt by Arthur Conan Doyle to kill off the character in ‘The Adventure of the Final Problem’. Although Conan Doyle had wanted to dispense with Holmes and write about something else, he bowed to the pressure to continue the great detective’s adventures that came from the many readers who refused to accept that Holmes had died in the duel with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, or could ever die.

It is apparent from A Legacy of Spies that something similar has happened in relation to George Smiley. The rotund, socially awkward yet ruthlessly capable master spy was introduced by John le Carré in his début novel, Call for the Dead (1961). More than half a century later, Smiley remains le Carré’s most popular and enduring creation, though the author has for the most part written stories that concern other characters and situations. Of le Carré’s twenty-four published novels, Smiley appears in nine.

For a book that began as a tweet, Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India has had a remarkable journey, taking its best-selling author on a world tour, both to the centre of Empire in the United Kingdom, and its outpost in Australia. A career diplomat who retired as under-secretary general at the United Nations in 2001, Tharoor is now a member of parliament for the Lower House in Kerala and renowned both for his views, and his eloquence, on Indian history, geopolitics, economics, and international relations.

The book’s genesis has acquired mythic proportions by now and bears repetition: in 2015, Tharoor was invited by the Oxford Union to debate the proposition, ‘Britain Owes Reparations to Her Former Colonies’, and carried the day. He tweeted a link to the video of his speech, and the rest, as they say, is history. The tweet went viral, was downloaded and replicated on hundreds of sites, shared via email and Whats-App, topped three million views on a single site itself, leading to Tharoor being hailed by those who had previously ‘trolled’ him online, and to the publication of hundreds of articles arguing the pros and cons of his position and seminars that discussed the ramifications of what is now referred to as his ‘Oxford speech’. Persuaded by David Davidar, editor of one of India’s most intelligent publishers (Aleph), to write a layman’s guide to the well-worn and extensively written-about topic of British colonialism in India, Tharoor then embarked upon An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India, published as Inglorious Empire in the United Kingdom, which sold more than 50,000 copies within six months of publication.

At the heart of Required Reading is a database called ALIAS (Analysis of Literature in Australian Schools). It includes all the reading material prescribed for senior secondary English and Literature courses in most of the states from 1945 to 2005. Like all electronic databases, ALIAS comprises a structured collection of items to view, navigate, and search. To make meaning from these items they need to be framed in narrative terms. This is precisely what the chapters in this book achieve in the most interesting ways.

The editors of Required Reading invited leading authors in the fields of English and literary studies to use ALIAS to track and understand postwar changes in senior secondary school English and literature courses. By selecting, juxtaposing, and connecting items in the database, the contributors have created narratives about the texts set as literature in senior classrooms. The narratives are invested with the authors’ knowledge of curriculum histories, theories and practices of teaching, and histories of literary criticism and theory. The book represents the first large-scale study of what was set on English syllabuses in Australia and in which disciplinary, institutional, socio-historical, and pedagogical contexts.

Marriage equality

See 'The same-sex marriage debate' by Peter Rose

Dear Editor,
How sad it is that the Australian political leadership is so inept, so hostage to minority interests – in this case, those of the conservative Christian variety. This in a country in which:

• thirty per cent of people state they have no religion, while only eight per cent are regular churchgoers
• a majority of Christians support same-sex nuptials
• sixty-one per cent of Christians are unhappy with conservative religious groups representing the views of all Christians, including 55 per cent of regular churchgoers

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). 27 June 2017. '2016 Census data reveals “no religion” is rising fast'.

MacSmith, J. July 24, 2017. 'Australian Christians support same sex marriage according to new poll'.

McCrindle Research. March 28, 2013. 'Church attendance in Australia'.

David Rowlands (online comment)

Dear Editor,
My only quibble with the excellent article is the following words: ‘homosexuality remains one of the principal causes of suicide’. Any sexual preference doesn’t cause anything, rather it is how society responds to a person’s choice. On the other hand women might suggest that pregnancy be a direct cause of heterosexual behaviour ...

David Toma (online comment)

Peter Rose replies:

David Toma was quite right to fault my loose wording. That sentence should have read, ‘Even now, homophobia and violence towards homosexuals remain principal causes of suicide and despair in our society.’

Dear Editor,
How very well put! If only we could hope that some influential members of parliament were listening and intelligent enough to process it. What a sorry chapter in Australia’s political history. What should have been so simple to be made so stupidly political, labyrinthine, and expensive. We should all be ashamed.

Robert Sessions (online comment)

Dear Editor,
I have just read the Peter Rose’s Comment regarding same-sex marriage. I then searched the magazine for a page devoted to the other side of the debate, the No vote. This did not exist. I am astounded and disappointed that this publication should treat your readers so poorly. A debate, after all, is a two-sided matter. You insult your readers by presenting only half the argument.

Joanna Hackett, Macleay Island, Qld

Dear Editor,
Thank you for articulating so eloquently what many of us feel. Aside from the fundamental question of equal rights, spending $122 million on an opinion poll that won’t be binding on members of parliament is an outrage. Of course, the reason for all this is the power that the religious right exerts on government.

Neil Spark (online comment)

Dear Editor,
A bold and fiery tizzy, but it lacks logic. Gay couples are special and different, so should enjoy the special and different bonding of a Civil Union. Changing the Marriage Act would cause social chaos. This has occurred in other lands.

Cathy Macleod (online comment)

Peter Rose replies:

I am pleased that Ms Macleod thought my Comment ‘bold and fiery’. It was intended to be. Her use of ‘tizzy’ is curious – and loaded of course. Perhaps some of those people who do not belong to a minority that has been ‘insulted, blackmailed, beaten, incarcerated, and murdered’ cannot understand gay and lesbians’ dismay at the mean-spiritedness and illogicality of the No case.

‘Gay couples are special and different, so should enjoy the special and different bonding of a Civil Union,’ Ms Macleod writes. In what way are they ‘special and different’?

And as for: ‘Changing the Marriage Act would cause social chaos’ – that’s the sort of intemperate rhetoric we expect from Cory Bernardi.

Spilt ink

Dear Editor,
In an otherwise fine review of Nick Horne’s editing of his father’s writings, Ryan Cropp comments in passing that ‘remarkably little ink has been spilled chronicling the lives of Australia’s intellectuals, those writers and thinkers whose ideas changed the way Australians think about themselves and the world they live in’ (ABR, August 2017). Stuart Macintyre, Judith Brett, Robert Manne, Jill and Michael Roe, Tom Griffiths, Tim Rowse, Race Matthews, Clive James, amongst many others, would be surprised to see their many pages of ‘spilt ink’ ignored by this claim. In particular, Peter Beilharz’s Thinking the Antipodes: Australian essays (2014) has chapters dedicated to specific thinkers ranging from John Anderson, Vere Childe, H.V. Evatt, Bernard Smith, Robert Hughes, George Seddon, Hugh Stretton, Jean Martin, through to Peter Carey. Donald Horne gets a guernsey, but not his own chapter. Go figure. Better still, go read.

Trevor Hogan, Singapore

Ryan Cropp replies:

Trevor Hogan rightly observes that there has been some fine ink spilled on the subject of intellectuals in Australia. Perhaps my metaphor was imprecise – the intention of my comment being that such figures as he lists barely register in popular memory. Outside particular circles, the appetite for intellectual biography in Australia remains (lamentably) poor, especially in contrast with cricketers and war heroes.

The human Rabin

Dear Editor,
It’s a dangerous thing to make the human abstract, and this is what Danielle Celermajer does in her review of Yitzhak Rabin: Soldier, leader, statesman, by Itamar Rabinovich (ABR, September 2017). This book, after all, is the biography of a man, not the political history of a nation, despite the big role that Yitzhak Rabin played in that.

Celermajer has chosen to present this work through her own political perspective of the modern State of Israel, which appears to preclude any idea of Palestinian responsibility for their fate. She has been tempted to read Rabin’s biography ‘as a story of the State of Israel’. Her evaluation of that story distorts historical facts by omission and/or inversion, pays no attention to the important aspect of the origins of a Jewish homeland, and overlooks Rabin the man. It gives ABR readers no idea of the content, flavour, or texture of the book.

Celermajer hypothesises the 1948 War of Independence as ‘an act of violent colonialism’, thereby damning Rabin as complicit. The war was in fact initiated by Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia on the announcement of Israel as a nation State.

Rabin is quoted as saying that his country was his life. For him that meant part of his heart and soul, not just his life as a political project or his ideological or religious beliefs. Rabin and the author of his biography deserve more than the philosophical/political judgement Celermajer has meted out.

Liat Kirby, Inala, Qld

Danielle Celermajer replies:

One of the greatest challenges to achieving justice and peace in our era is to bridge the gaping chasm between people of different political persuasions and commitments. Nowhere is this more evident than with respect to Israel and Palestine. My response to this letter will not speculate on why the author has misread my review to the extent she has. I simply wish to set the record straight. The review does not hypothesise that ‘the 1948 War of Independence’ was ‘“an act of violent colonialism”, thereby damning Rabin as complicit’. It states that if a reader comes to the biography with an obdurate view that this is an accurate description of that war, then their damning Rabin as complicit will follow as a matter of course. Indeed, the very next sentence contemplates the interpretative arc of a reader at the opposite end of the political spectrum, one who views Oslo ‘as a betrayal of the Jewish people’ and thus is bound to judge Rabin as a ‘reckless traitor’.

My hope in beginning my review with these portraits of two hypothetical readers, and the tragic inevitability of their divergent responses, was to encourage each of us to reflect on how our own preconceptions render us impermeable to information that does not conform with our pre-existing schemas. There is of course much one could choose to emphasise in the biography of a life as rich as Rabin’s. I chose to illuminate in particular those creative qualities that enabled him to break with the seeming inevitability of large social and political forces in order to bring new and unexpected possibilities into existence. Training our eyes on this human quality was, and remains, my attempt to invoke him as an exemplar that we might emulate.