Everyone agreed that the day was just right for the picnic to Hanging Rock – a shimmering summer morning warm and still ...

Far from being a flimsy, frilly story for women full of antique charm and middle-class manners, Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock is a novel of sharp social observations and nuanced critique; subtle and sometimes latent sensuality; and layered, intricate allegory. The ‘shimmering summer morning warm and still’ brings the opposite to what it promises. Life is more complex and unstable in Lindsay’s world. Whoever would have thought that a picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900 would go so horribly wrong for the students and teachers of Appleyard College, or that the picnickers would return to the school with three senior girls and one teacher missing at Hanging Rock?

Michelle de Kretser

Sybille Smith’s Mothertongue (Vagabond) is a thoughtful, brief memoir-in-essays, chiefly concerned with growing up between two places, Vienna and Sydney, and two languages, German and English. It speaks of loss and carves out recoveries (partial, provisional) in moving, lucid prose; a small gem.

In a big year for Australian novels, here’s a shout out for two collections of stories. Jennifer Down’s Pulse Points (Text Publishing, reviewed in ABR 9/17) consolidates her reputation as a remarkable young writer. Her stories are effortlessly global yet strongly anchored in place. They testify to Down’s remarkable powers of observation and her ability to create bleak but engaging worlds – the longer tales are especially potent. Tony Birch’s Common People (UQP, 9/17) also traffics in characters in difficult circumstances, but Birch is tender as well as unsentimental. This sturdily crafted collection, Birch’s best yet, offers illuminating, sometimes harrowing narratives that sing of solidarity and humour in hardscrabble lives.

Geordie Williamson

In a world where nations are more likely to militarise than to engage in dialogue, to build walls rather than open borders, Sarah Sentilles’s Draw Your Weapons (Text Publishing, 8/17) is a formally elegant and intellectually rigorous argument for peace. Not a pacifist manifesto so much as a collage built from paradox and juxtaposition – from encounters with images of terror, war, and torture – whose total implication is clear. We in the affluent West cannot remain unsullied by refusing to look at evidence of the multiplying human disasters around us. Sentilles’ book inspires us to be more than we are, to live beyond our historical moment. Not a call to arms so much as a call to the writers’ pen.

As expected, the postal survey has produced a strong majority in favour of marriage equality. 61.6 per cent of respondents have voted Yes. A postal survey that few people wanted – a sop to bigots, reactionaries, and the prime minister’s enemies in his party – has endorsed the accuracy of numerous opinion polls. After a divisive and hugely expensive survey, the people have delivered an emphatic message. Like nearly all our key allies around the world, they have no problem with the notion that all adults should have the right to marry – not just some.

In the early days of the campaign, Australian Book Review was surprised by the despondency of many Australians, long inured to the illiberal and obfuscatory tactics of the far right and their friends in the media. With the first exit polls, the mood quickly changed to one of relief and resolve. People lobbied, debated, advertised, and – best of all – organised. Hundreds of organisations and companies (ABR among them) expressed unequivocal support for marriage equality. I spoke to a number of parents and grandparents who had exhorted their peripatetic children to make sure they voted. Alex Miller put it well when I invited him to endorse our open letter: ‘One very good, and unexpected, result of this public discussion is that those of us who knew ourselves to be one with the family of LGBTI now feel more openly a part of that union. Before this business, the togetherness was implicit, now, at least here in this community, it is a stated reality. And stronger, I think. People have stood up.’

Today there will be much euphoria in the LGBTI community – and beyond. Liberal-minded Australians will share our relief that a country almost pathologically averse to social change and reform for two decades has called time on intolerance, alarmism, and backwardness. As Peter van Onselen wrote in The Australian, ‘It took the public to do what politicians haven’t had the guts to do for years.’

That said, marriage equality will not be available until parliament legislates. It remains for our parliamentarians to endorse this reform without further delay or qualification. Enough is enough. Australians will not tolerate more furphies or procrastination.

Unexpectedly, 2017 may turn out to be a signal year for progressivism in this country. Marriage equality (inconceivable two decades ago) is all but a fait accompli. The New South Wales and Victorian state parliaments are close to legalising euthanasia (a right supported by an even more overwhelming majority of Australians, as revealed in countless opinion polls). Recently, the disgraceful limitation of the Namatjira copyright, to the exclusion of his family, has been resolved fairly and honourably.

Much was written during this campaign – some of it bigoted rubbish, but mostly thoughtful arguments on both sides. None spoke better sense than Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute, who reminded us that: ‘It is a foundational principle of democracy that all citizens should be treated equally. To depart from this principle requires a compelling reason. In the case of marriage, there is only an appeal to tradition. The naysayers ... stir up fear of change just as their counterparts did during the republic referendum campaign. Yet the sky did not fall in on America, Britain or France when they provided for marriage equality. Is Australia uniquely incapable of protecting marital freedom and religious freedom at the same time? How low an opinion of our country do the No campaigners have? To reject their tactics would also be to reject the negative politics that have held Australia back for a decade. If we can get this done, we may surprise ourselves with what else we can get done’ (AFR, 17 October 2017).

Celebrations at the State Library of Victoria (photograph by Peter Rose)

Now that Australia has rediscovered its reforming zest of the 1970s and 1980s, let us hope that the age of ‘negative politics’ is over and that we will see action on pressing issues such as climate change, Indigenous affairs, inequality, women’s rights, and the republic.

To paraphrase Diaghilev – and Michael Fullilove – let’s astonish ourselves!

More than any other political party in Australia, One Nation represents a puzzle for commentators. When trying to explain its support – which has hovered around ten per cent since its revival in 2016 – the temptation is to look for subtext, something deeper, beneath the surface. Could the party’s cultural pitch really be a code for economic concerns, with immigration a metaphor for the genuine fear of international competition? Perhaps we are witnessing a new political coalition of those ‘left behind’ by social change, bound together by a suspicion of everything cosmopolitan. Or is One Nation simply a vehicle for those pissed off at a stagnant political order, hoping to unseat and humiliate its representatives? What really motivates the mythical One Nation voter?

Rainbows and bad losers

The mood outside the State Library of Victoria on 15 November 2017 was exultant – once the precarious line from Canberra had been restored and the ABS’s expatiatory chief statistician, David Kalisch, finally announced that 61.6 per cent of Australians had voted Yes in the postal survey. The feeling was one of relief and euphoria. It was over, at last, and the democratic rights of all Australians had been ratified by a substantial majority of Australians.

Elsewhere, there were recalcitrants. Later that morning I appeared on The Conversation Hour with Jon Faine and Karina Okotel, a prominent opponent of marriage equality. Ms Okotel lamented the likely challenges to archbishops and businesses and civil celebrants – totally ignoring the feelings of a class that has been persecuted for centuries. The right, as Dennis Altman wrote in The Guardian, are bad losers.

Celebrations at the State Library of Victoria (photograph by Peter Rose)

Congratulations to everyone who organised, lobbied, debated, written, and signed letters (including our own). This is a famous result, and surely a turning point from the nation. There is an exquisite irony in all this: Tony Abbott and his ilk have succeeded in unifying liberal-minded Australians in a way we haven’t seen in two or three decades. Ed.

My fuller comment on the result itself was published last month.

Liveable palaces

There are some outstanding art exhibitions on offer at present, especially the elegantly installed Mapplethorpe show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, which Helen Ennis reviewed for ABR Arts (we will also run this in our January–February double issue).

The National Gallery of Victoria has several linked exhibitions at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia. They are: The Highway is a Disco (Del Kathryn Barton); Our Knowing and Not Knowing (Helen Maudsley); Palace of the Republic (Louise Paramor); Ensemble (Mel O’Callaghan); and Transformer (Gareth Sansom). Sophie Knezic is our reviewer.

The NGV exhibitions were launched on 16 November by the Victorian governor, Linda Dessau, who, in a cringe-making address, presented like a junior minister in the state government, extolling the ‘liveability’ of Melbourne and the ‘caring’ nature of all art (tell that to Francis Bacon). Her Excellency even tried to revive the old Sydney –Melbourne divide. It felt like marketing at its most banal. If we must have these expensive vice-regents in their palaces, they should do better than that.

Prizes galore

Poets don’t have much time to enter the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now worth a total of $8,500. It closes on 3 December. Essayists have longer: the Calibre Essay Prize (now worth $7,500) doesn’t close until 15 January 2018.

Meanwhile, we look forward to announcing details of the 2018 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in the next issue.

Politicians in ancient Greece were well acquainted with the alluring intersection between sport and politics. Alcibiades, an ambitious aristocrat, entered seven chariots in the 416 BCE Olympics, aware of the potential political benefits. He came first, second, and fourth, later citing this ‘splendid performance’ to the Athenian assembly while lobbying for a senior military appointment in the Peloponnesian War.

Since then, sport and politics have become even more intertwined. Sports of all kinds serve as potent tools of nationalism. Eric Hobsbawm famously wrote that ‘the imagined community of millions seems more real as a team of eleven named people’. The image-building potential of sporting mega-events, meanwhile, has enchanted national leaders from Hitler to Ronald Reagan, Paul Keating to Vladimir Putin.

Have you heard of the Anthropocene, the so-called Age of Humans? Our geological epoch has been renamed because human influences on Earth are so profound that not only is our climate changing, but so are our soils, water, and social order. Bruno Latour, prolific French philosopher and historian of science, dedicates his book, Facing Gaia, to this ‘new climatic regime’, which leads to questions no smaller than how the Anthropocene changes our understanding of the planet, species, and politics. As the title indicates, the book is centred around the ancient Greek goddess Gaia, who became patron of the scientific Gaia theory developed by British chemist James Lovelock and American microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and 1970s. But why does a respectable science philosopher born of the French academies devote his book to the ‘monstrous, shameless, primitive’ Gaia when facing this new reality that will determine war and peace, food and water? Why do we need a silly goddess for serious times? The answer is intricately woven and presented in eight lectures, originally drafted for the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, and translated back and forth between English and French.

Millions of words have been printed by and about Charles Darwin. There are hundreds of biographies, the dozens of books he wrote (including his own autobiography), as well as various pamphlets, essays, correspondence, diaries, manuscript notes, and other ephemera. Fascinating though the man and his work is, it must be hard to come up with anything new to say about him.

Perhaps this is why A.N. Wilson opens his new biography, Charles Darwin: Victorian mythmaker, with the bald statement that ‘Darwin was wrong’. It is a perplexing start. Darwin was ‘wrong’ about a great many things – the mechanism of inheritance, for instance. Scientific theories evolve, adapt, diversify, and separate over time. We don’t expect any of them, not even Charles Lyell’s, to remain set in stone. Wilson’s lack of familiarity with science is apparent from the opening pages through to his references (mostly books, rarely scientific articles). The early pages are filled with imprecise definitions, inapt vocabulary (like ‘fact’ and ‘truth’), culminating in this dramatic question on page five: ‘What exactly, did Darwin discover? Or is his theory just that – simply a theory?’ My forehead hits the table, under the impetus of gravity, which is also ‘simply a theory’, but leaves a bruise nonetheless.

‘I always dreamed that I would read a book that would be absolutely everything that I’ve wanted, and because I didn’t find that book, I wrote it myself. I don’t mean one particular book. I mean my collected works.’

Gerald Murnane (2015 interview)

There is a whiff of mythology about Gerald Murnane. He is quietly infamous for who he isn’t: for the things he’s never done (travel by aeroplane); the things he’ll never do (live outside of Victoria, wear sunglasses); the things he’ll never do again (watch movies or a Shakespeare play); the books he won’t read (contemporary fiction); the books he won’t write (interrogations of national identity); and the literary prizes he hasn’t won (almost all of them – much to critical incredulity). Australians often struggle with strangeness: we do not easily surrender to the unconventional, the wilfully eccentric, or the unapologetically clever. It’s hard to know what to do with a writer who is all three.

Paul Keating claims that he wanted to arrest John Kerr. There were perhaps two points at which Kerr might justly have been taken into custody. There was the critical moment just after he handed Gough Whitlam the letter sacking him. Margaret Whitlam wondered why her husband had not simply slapped Kerr across the face ‘and told him to pull himself together’. But if you are one of the dwindling band that agrees with Garfield Barwick that ‘Sir John did his duty’, you presumably also support Kerr’s decision to refuse to see the Speaker of the House of Representatives when he arrived later bearing a no-confidence motion. A self-respecting constitutional democracy might well have secured Kerr’s arrest at this point. His determination to dissolve parliament, and to arrange an election with Malcolm Fraser as incumbent, made a mockery of parliamentary government, never mind democracy.

No event illustrates the intellectual vacuity of Australian conservatism more vividly. The right still regularly assails our senses with its bleating about our glorious British constitutional and parliamentary heritage. But at the very moment when that heritage was being debauched for partisan advantage, they looked on and cheered. Tribalism trumped principle.

Jenny Hocking, Whitlam’s biographer, has done us a dual service in these matters. She has updated, for the second time, her splendid and definitive account, first published in 2015. She has continued to track down primary material that enriches our understanding. But Hocking has also brought to the Federal Court a case to secure the release of ‘the Palace letters’ – the correspondence that passed between Kerr, the queen, and her private secretary. These documents are in the National Archives of Australia, but have been deemed ‘personal’ and ‘private’, and therefore unavailable to researchers under the Archives Act. Unless the court rules otherwise, Buckingham Palace gets to decide in 2027 if we are entitled to see them.

This is a book with a strange genesis. Its author, Derek Rielly, explains that he confessed to an agent one night that he’d always wanted to meet Bob Hawke. Her response was: ‘I know a publisher who loves Bob. Get me a proposal.’ In order to obtain Bob’s cooperation, Rielly had first to win over Blanche d’Alpuget and then the ‘greatest post-war prime minister’ himself. Given that Blanche herself has had two goes at nailing her husband’s colours to history’s mast, and that there is in fact a vast literature on The Hawke Ascendancy (as Paul Kelly, no less, tagged it), both of these ageing lovebirds are at first a little dubious about what more might be said. But the brash, youngish author (he tells us that Bob ‘filled my teenage season, culturally and politically’) informs the ex-PM he wants to interview him ‘about the joy of love. Desire. Finding true love through infidelity. Fatherhood. Success. Friendship. Religion in the modern world. Sport. The making of a man and what manhood is. Women. The lingering tang of any political bitterness. Enemies. The state of geopolitics. Death.’

In 1989, as the Chinese Communist Party came to terms with the ongoing significance of religion in post-Mao China, they needed a new formula to explain its survival. Religion was, they said, a long-term phenomenon. It had a mass base; it had national dimensions, in that some of China’s nationalities identified strongly with particular religions; but it also had international dimensions – religious ties linked believers to communities outside China. Reaching the end of the list, the bureaucrats seem to have simply thrown up their hands: religion was, they said, complicated.

Competing with Middle Eastern wars, terrorist attacks, and presidential tweets, Asia still tends to receive less attention than it merits. Furthermore, while geopolitical tectonic-shifts are occurring in the Indo-Pacific, it can be difficult to step back from daily headlines to assess the current transformation in its entirety. In Easternization, Gideon Rachman, a Financial Times journalist, argues that an epochal shift in power is occurring from West to East, especially in China. Some significant problems with his execution should not obscure the vital importance of his thesis.

The ‘root cause’ of Asia’s transformation, Rachman tells us, has been its ‘extraordinary economic development’. It began with Japan and the Asian ‘Tigers’ from the 1950s. China and India followed after undertaking economic reforms from, respectively, 1978 and 1991. Economic growth matters because economic power leads to political power: Asian states’ high GDP growth is allowing them to erode the West’s military, diplomatic, and technological dominance. ‘The consequences’, Rachman argues, are now ‘defining global politics’.

It’s a provocative title. Forty-two years ago, Phillip Knightley’s The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The war correspondent as hero, propagandist, and myth-maker (1975) kick-started a new field of media history. Knightley’s rollicking account of journalistic connivance with political and military power from the Crimean to the Gulf Wars spared his industry nothing. The fourth estate’s serial pursuit of national self-interest, its abandonment of objectivity, truth, and morality, revealed many of our most storied war reporters as grovelling servants of the powers that be, monsters of avarice and deception whose first duty was to their own wealth and preferment. If truth was the first casualty of war, principle was prominent among the collateral damage.

Brenda Niall has touched on aspects of her own life in many of her admired biographies of writers and artists, such as the Boyd family and the Durack sisters, and Melbourne’s Irish Catholic Father Hackett and Archbishop Mannix. Time – and perhaps the deaths of central people – has pulled her focus in close to tell the story of her maternal grandmother, Agnes Gorman, and through her the extended family, in Can You Hear the Sea?

This portrait of an impressive ordinary woman reminded me of Kate Grenville’s biography of her mother, One Life (2015). Like Grenville, Niall had the gift of her mother’s unpublished memoirs, which she explains were both the main source and the impetus for her book. How fortunate, in both cases, that they were passed on to responsible, professional writers. Niall also applies all her skills as a biographer, drawing on other family records and interviews with surviving relatives, as well as public archives and published histories. She is clear about her process, asking questions, noting gaps, offering her own memories with an easy blend of intimacy and distance, in an authoritative yet conversational voice.

Every Saturday around Australia, the suburbs hum with the sound of lawnmowers. While cutting grass, the mowers simultaneously decapitate the milk thistles (also known as sow thistles) that sprout in most gardens around the country. But this rude beheading is little more than an inconvenience from which these hardy plants soon recover. Perhaps this is why, despite their benign name, milk thistles rate a mention on the webpage of a company that is synonymous with weedkillers. The Roundup page describes milk thistles as ‘a common weed’ that ‘can reach over two meters if not controlled’. Given the apparent threat, the solution to managing these seemingly triffid-like proportions appears obvious and unavoidable. Homeowners must take part in the ‘war on weeds’.

The literary world too often disdains comedy writing as unserious. It rarely features in our grander prizes, and is usually relegated to literature’s cheap seats. This is, of course, silly. Great comedy can make as many grave points about humanity as realist fiction. You just get to laugh along the way.

Two crackling literary memoirs by comedians show this seriousness of purpose. Robert Webb is best known for co-starring in the Mitchell and Webb sketch shows and the sitcom Peep Show. Given that pedigree, he could have written a memoir about professional glory and pissed banter with David Mitchell. But How Not To Be a Boy is more courageous, offering a Bildungsroman that examines the effect of his mother’s death on his early life, and the culture of toxic masculinity that muffled his grief and stifled his emotional growth (basically, everything you’d get in po-faced literary fiction – plus jokes).

You’ll be lost in the headlong city, turning your oar, older
Her house needs to stay open for another October

In the preface to Demi-Gods, a boy burns moths with a magnifying glass. A girl – the novel’s narrator, Willa – watches ‘khaki wings’ that seem to be ‘folded from rice paper’. She imagines ‘ten moths circling a candle to form a lantern’, cries later, but does not stop Patrick. The wings ignite ‘like dog-eared pages in a book’.

Like dog-eared pages, Willa’s memories are folded for revisiting. Memory, she thinks, returning to a handful of charged encounters with Patrick over many years, is a dwelling place both in the sense of a residence and ‘a lingering’. Lingering disrupts time. It holds and expands some moments, eclipsing others. In narrative terms, the novel’s vivid pieces enact the push-pull of magnification and erasure, set against the backdrop of a child’s developing awareness amidst neglectful and self-absorbed adults.

Writing this review in the first week in November, I look at the calendar and note that we are a few days away from the seventy-ninth anniversary of Kristallnacht, when, over the two days of 9–10 November 1938, at the instigation of Joseph Goebbels, there was a nationwide pogrom against German Jews that saw synagogues, business premises, and private homes ransacked. At least ninety people were killed, perhaps many more. It was a sign of things to come.

A.S. Patrić’s new novel, Atlantic Black, is set – although this isn’t mentioned in the book – about seven weeks after these events, on an ocean liner in the mid-Atlantic on New Year’s Eve of 1938, by which time many people could already see the blackness that 1939 would bring to the world. ‘Anytime I hear that date,’ Patrić said in a recent interview, ‘for me it’s a shorthand for catastrophe, for cataclysm.’  The symbolic structure of this book is simple and strong: characters of mixed nationalities are all at sea, crossing a world on the eve of destruction.

In this inventive début novel, Pip Smith recounts the multiple lives of Eugenia Falleni, the ‘man-woman’ who in 1920, as Harry Crawford, was convicted of murdering his first wife, Annie Birkett. Smith employs various types of text–sketches, newspaper articles, witness statements – alongside third-person accounts – to embroider an archive rich in narrative possibilities. The story moves from Wellington, New Zealand, in 1885 to Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century. Each of Falleni’s multiple selves (Nina, Tally Ho, Harry Crawford, Jack, Gene, and Jean Ford) tells his or her own first-person story. In this way, the structure of the novel conveys Falleni’s perpetually shifting identity.

Simile haunts The Pacific Room. So many sentences begin ‘It’s as if ...’ that the phrase seems like an incantation.

Michael Fitzgerald writes that he agrees with Robert Louis Stevenson that ‘every book is, in an intimate sense, a circular letter to the friends of him who writes it. They alone take his meaning.’ For the reviewer coming from outside the circle, this book does not so much erect screens as exist within a lush, enticing forest of signs which seems indifferent to one’s presence. As Teuila, the Samoan fa‘afafine, confidently climbs to the summit of Mount Vaea in the dark, we are told, ‘For an outsider there is no hint of what lies ahead, so inscrutable is the dense foliage.’ One is aware that given time and multiple readings, the forest might become as familiar as it is to Teuila. On a first reading, the best option is to let the strangeness of the book seep into one’s consciousness and resist the temptation to seek clarification at every twist in the path.

Dancing Home opens in forthright fashion. The author, Paul Collis, urges readers to ‘[t]ake sides. Be involved in the ideas I’ve written into this book.’ The novel offers an uncompromising examination of some of the injustices faced by Indigenous Australians.

Drawing Sybylla is a wonderfully unusual book, narrated in parts by a modern-day Sybil – one of those ‘mad mouthpieces’ of prophesy and poetry from Ancient Greece. This Sybil springs to life from an elaborate doodle in a notebook, drawn by a Sydney Writers’ Festival panelist who is listening to another writer on her panel. This writer is describing to the audience a feminist short story from 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a work in which a woman, diagnosed by her physician husband as suffering ‘a slight hysterical tendency’, is confined to a single room to rest and recover, and slowly descends into madness, beginning to see other women moving behind – and trapped behind – the intricate patterns of the wallpaper. And it is this wallpaper, these figures, that come to form the central metaphor of Kelada’s book – as the suddenly animated ink figure, aptly named Sybylla, invites her creator to step behind the wallpaper and into its pattern, and examine the lives of other women writers, in Australia, across time.

It is hard to review a novel when you don’t want to discuss two-thirds of it – not because it is not worth discussing, but because doing so risks undermining the genius of the novel’s structure. The blurb of Claire G. Coleman’s début makes clear that the novel is ‘not [about] the Australia of our history’, but for the first third of the novel, this is not readily apparent.

You can’t help but smile while reading Robert Edeson’s Bad to Worse, his second book featuring Richard Worse, polymath, conversationalist, fighter, and resident of Perth. The mirth may have something to do with the Dickensian names Edeson uses throughout – not just Worse, but an aeronautics engineer called Walter Reckles, the Norwegian–British logician Edvard Tossentern, and the aptly named villain, Glimpse (who only makes a short appearance). It may also come from the reader trying to separate the real science and philosophy from the author defying the laws of nature and daring his readers to pick the difference.

As we approach the end of what might be considered another pretty terrible year, it’s worth being reminded that every age has its tribulations. In Flaubert in the Ruins of Paris, Peter Brooks – Ivy League professor in comparative literature, and author of Henry James Goes to Paris (2007) – takes on a year in the history of France known as l’année terrible, a year whose physical and psychological violence would, once again, reopen the scars left by France’s revolution of 1789.

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

The Good Country begins in February 1840 with a cross-cultural encounter in Djadja Wurrung country, now central Victoria. Two Protectors of Aborigines, recently appointed to the burgeoning pastoral district around Port Phillip, met with an Aboriginal group camped near Mount Mitchell. At this time, the Aboriginal protectorate had been operating for little more than a year as an experiment in ‘humane’ governance. Designed less as a foil to colonisation than as a means of mitigating its impacts, the protectorate had various parallels around the British Empire in offices of protection for slaves, indentured labourers, and others perceived in need of imperial concern. As part conciliator, part magistrate, and part missionary, the Protectors’ role was to uphold Aboriginal people’s rights of redress against injury or exploitation by settlers, and convert them into Christian farmers and labourers. Present at this day’s encounter were George Augustus Robinson, Van Diemen’s Land’s famed ‘conciliator’ and now Chief Protector for the Port Phillip District, and Edward Stone Parker, come amongst the Djadja Wurrung as their advocate. The head of the Aboriginal group was Nandelowwindic. He recognised the colonial officials and invited them to sit. Identifying features of the landscape for their benefit, Nandelowwindic told them that this was ‘my country, merrygic barbarie, good country’.

It is rare, in 2017, to return to a long news story’s beginning, to untangle its threads and find how it came to occupy its looming position in the cultural imagination, to learn how the dog-whistle words gathered their energy. Impressively, Benjamin Law’s Quarterly Essay achieves this feat. It is a meticulously researched piece of writing, clear-eyed and forceful. Law makes the unambiguous case that conservative media figures and politicians lied about the Safe Schools program and ruthlessly exploited the queer community as a battleground in the culture war. He traces Safe Schools’ transformation from a policy launched by the Abbott government and happily supported (or at least tolerated) by both sides of politics, into a political football about which The Australian wrote thirty-one stories in 2015 alone.

In the Australia of my childhood, the Gypsy skirt was fashionable, ABC Radio played Django Reinhardt, ‘The Gypsy Rover’ was in school songbooks, peripatetic players were called ‘Gypsy footballers’, the Gypsy Jokers were a feared bikie gang, and nefarious Gypsies were stock villains in children’s books. Gypsies – or Roma – occupied cultural terrain, but the people themselves had a low profile. Mandy Sayer attempts to redress this. She reveals that Roma have been in Australia since the First Fleet, and estimates the current local population at 100,000. While Roma have faced discrimination in this country, it pales against their persecution in other nations across history.

It is obvious that Sayer is passionate about her topic. She has travelled and read widely, interviewed many Roma and immersed herself in their culture. It is unfortunate that the resulting book has so many shortcomings. Even in this age of ‘truthiness’, where feelings supplant facts, the contract between non-fiction author and reader is founded on a promise of accuracy. Sayer’s book is littered with errors. She dates the end of convict transportation as 1852 – it was 1868. She has gold deposits being found in Victoria and then later in New South Wales, rather than the other way around. She gives an incorrect figure for Australia’s population in 1851. She claims that in the 1850s, ‘virtually every new immigrant who arrived in Melbourne needed to buy a good horse to transport them to the diggings’. Many goldseekers travelled to the diggings by commercial coach, dray, or ox-cart, and many more walked. She describes Elvis Presley as a country and western artist and states that during World War II Australians had to obtain written permission to cross state borders. None of these mistakes is unforgivable, but the cumulative effect is damaging. If easily verifiable facts are skew-whiff, it diminishes faith in the veracity of her original research.

When W.H. Auden took the cue for his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ from Brueghel’s Fall of Icarus, he did not presume the reader’s knowledge of the iconography of the painting but rather sprang open its central and universal theme, which touches all our lives: how ‘dreadful martyrdom must run its course’. It is easy to think our lurid times are perhaps unsuited to such universalities, given the way we loudly chart even the smallest martyrdom, or indulge the biggest Trump on any manner of forums without ever feeling the need to properly situate the subject within a unifying longue durée. The cultural seeds of Trumpism may be found in most real estate offices, just as they are in Aeschylus and Dan Brown. But who cares about that? When it comes to capturing hearts and minds, umbrage and outrage are as much subject to the traction of demand and supply as anything else. At present, there are more poets writing in this country alone than there are footballers kicking goals at the highest level or politicians compromising the healthy future of our children’s climate. But where are the crowds, where is the hysteria, and the press conferences? Thankfully, not here. Like the ploughman ignoring Icarus falling into the sea in Brueghel’s painting, the workaday world and its directional spotlight will always carry on as if nothing has happened in the poetry world.

Alan Wearne’s work over the past thirty years or so – dense, demanding, unique, rewarding – is like the oeuvre of a cinematic auteur: one that never quite got onto the syllabus, or brought out the crowds at Cinémathèque. Technique above all, most of the time, but allied with real if unfamiliar emotion, even if the narrative needed the reader to have the right stuff in the first place before it unfolded itself.

More recently, the scope has lessened, the rhyme schemes become less ornate, the characters more constrained. One wouldn’t have noticed in his previous book, Prepare The Cabin For Landing (2012), with its overt Juvenalian satire woven through the personal narratives. But in These Things Are Real the two things have largely separated. The verse narratives in the first half of the book are more sanguine than we are used to from Wearne, with the antiqueness of the scenarios a kind of enabling constraint rather than a period set.

In the late 1950s, when he was a fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Learning, George Steiner overheard the legendary J. Robert Oppenheimer, at that time head of the Institute, dressing down a young physicist outside his door: ‘You are so young,’ boomed the father of the atomic bomb, ‘and you have already done so little!’  The story appears most recently in A Long Saturday, a series of conversations between Steiner and the French journalist and biographer Laure Adler, but it is one he has told several times before as a kind of apology for his own unflagging industry as an educator, critic, essayist, and novelist. ‘After comments like that,’ he reflects, ‘you could only hang yourself.’

During the past few European summers, several of the world’s biggest soccer clubs have deigned to visit Australian shores for branding exercises more commonly referred to as ‘friendlies’. These dull, meaningless matches are organised almost solely to line the pockets of the visiting clubs, yet they have been immensely popular. Australia’s local soccer competition, the A-League, is modelled on this slick, corporate mutation of modern sport. For the last twelve years, strategically located clubs have played in rented stadiums in front of paying customers. Soccer’s governing élites carefully control the sport’s ‘brand’ and its ‘metrics’. This is Australian soccer’s brave new world. Before the revolution, we are told, there was nothing.

In 1976, when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and his wife, Tamie, were on an official visit to the White House in Washington, she was shown the collection of Americana acquired through the White House Historical Association, an idea of Jacqueline Kennedy’s as First Lady. Her enthusiasm for a similar Australian fund coincided with government concern about the care and condition of not just one but four official establishments – Government House and The Lodge in Canberra, Admiralty House and Kirribilli House in Sydney. The committee formed to take responsibility for the buildings’ interiors, exteriors, and grounds recommended the formation of an Australiana Fund, which was to be autonomous, not advisory.

Collective coherence

Dear Editor,
It was disappointing to read Stephen Mills’s commentary on my recent Making Modern Australia: The Whitlam government’s 21st century agenda (ABR, 11/17). From a collection of eleven chapters Mills refers to just four and fails to mention the remaining seven. In doing so, he renounces any realistic attempt at a ‘review’ of the collection as a collection. There is no indication of the breadth of the book nor of the authors; the contributions of Stuart Macintyre, Murray Goot, Carol Johnson, James Walter, David Lee, and Greg Melleuish are simply ignored. Since these remaining seven chapters cover topics immediately identifiable as having strong contemporary resonance, to ignore them in a review that claims the collection fails to evidence the Whitlam government’s twenty-first century agenda is puzzling.

Mills has nothing but praise for each of the four chapters he mentions. How puzzling, if not absurd, that Mills can then ask, ‘what is the implication [of this] for modern Australia?’ Was the protection of universal health insurance and its counterpoint ‘medi-scare’ not a key issue in the double dissolution election just last year? And was that election itself not a failed attempt by Prime Minister Turnbull to do as Whitlam had successfully done in 1974 and use the mechanism of s. 57 to pass stalled legislation through a Joint Sitting of both houses of parliament? Whitlam remains the only prime minister to have done so, yet Mills sees no implications in this for modern Australia.

Likewise, Michelle Arrow’s exploration of the Royal Commission into Human Relationships into every aspect of ‘sexual citizenship’ only leaves Mills pondering how this in any way demonstrates ‘the claimed Whitlam agenda for the twenty-first century’. Seriously? That this comment could be written in the midst of the same-sex marriage debate and the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse is remarkable.

Finally, I simply cannot reconcile Mills’s prime concern being not with the individual contributions but with the lack of a preface, without which, Mills suggests, ‘the book lacks coherence’. While it is gratifying to see individual contributions acknowledged, Mills fails to see the significance of their collectivity – as if their presentation in singular form has somehow diminished their intrinsic and acknowledged value. The contributors, and most importantly your readers, deserve better than this.

Jenny Hocking, Clayton, Vic.

Stephen Mills replies:

It must be a professional failing of the academy that its inhabitants too often assume the coherence and relevance of their output as self-evident. That at least seems to be the case here, where the purported editor did not see it as necessary in the book itself, or even in her letter here, to provide any rationale, theme, or context to pull this diverse collection together. Instead it is all supposed to be ‘immediately identifiable’. Readers may join the dots as they see fit; the ‘intrinsic and acknowledged value’ of the contributions, it seems, needs no further elaboration.

The fundamental point of my review was this book’s ‘agenda’ title raises valid questions – about causality, political reform, and the recurrence of public policy problems – that should have been addressed by an editor. My review did acknowledge the breadth and credentials of the contributors, and argued that they have been let down. Lest readers be misled, Jennifer Hocking’s own chapter on s. 57 makes no reference to the Turnbull double dissolution or to ‘medi-scare’; likewise, Michelle Arrow’s chapter does not mention the same-sex marriage debate or the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. So context, it seems after all, is useful. But for that you’ll need to read the newspapers.

Feast of hospitality

Dear Editor,
How much I enjoyed Elisabeth Holdsworth’s illuminating essay ‘If This Is a Jew’ (ABR, November 2017). In particular, I loved Elisabeth’s description of her ‘feast of audacious hospitality’. While I have allegiance to no particular faith, I take great pleasure in occasional visits to different places of worship – be it temple, synagogue, mosque, or church – for the sense of unity among the congregation, for the peace, calm, and hope that somehow thicken the very air, and for the uniqueness of the individual services. Overall, how similar are the messages. As Holdsworth points out ‘... as so often happens when Jews and Muslims get together, we ended up discussing what unites us rather than what divides us’. If I were allowed one wish, it would be that from the ignorance and upheaval of the current day, understanding and coherence not only eventuate, but triumph. It begins by educating ourselves and by abandoning our fears and prejudices – and it ends in a willingness to listen to others.

Tangea Tansley (online comment)

Thin walls

Dear Editor,
I attended the first of Musica Viva’s Melbourne performances of Rachel Podger and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (reviewed by Zoltán Szabó in ABR Arts). Here, too, Podger subtly interacted with the audience along the lines of what Szabó described. But I welcome such gestures. The economics of professional music-making in Mozart’s Europe were such that performers had to make sure that their audiences had a good time. Concert-goers routinely drank and ate during concerts, and no doubt talked as well. Any walls between the performers and audiences would have been very thin, and I think performers would have worked hard to engage their listeners, probably much more than Podger does.

Rachel Podger and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (photograph by Shane Reid)

It is time we moved away from music performance as purely cerebral, desiccated, and devoid of bodily communication between performers and audiences. It would make performances of classical music more engaging, accessible, and successful.

Brian Long (online comment)

Zoltán Szabó replies:

I discussed Rachel Podger’s ‘interaction’ with the audience because I did not find it subtle at all. It distracted from the enjoyment of the music. What may have been common practice centuries ago has changed. Thank goodness too! Otherwise our audiences would also eat, drink, and make bodily noises during performances. Nowadays we pay more attention and sit quietly as a sign of respect towards the artist’s hard work and the performance.

Like it or not, the fourth wall is there, in theatre, ballet, opera, concert halls. It fulfils a purpose – one with which I happen to agree – and in this concert the convention was ignored for no obvious or justifiable reason.

On 12 August 2017 a mob of neo-Nazis descended on the campus of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, chanting racial epithets while openly carrying rifles and pistols. Many of the participants were from groups that advocate not just racial supremacy but the end of the US federal government, which they see as tyrannical. This is not the first time that the University of Virginia (UVA) has been in the eye of the storm when it comes to radical movements calling for the end of national government. In the late 1950s, the libertarian economist James M. Buchanan used the university as a centre to launch an assault on Keynesian economics. From UVA and later George Mason University, also in Virginia, Buchanan trained a generation of right-wing thinkers and began amassing a war chest from affluent donors to link academia to the political interests of the super-rich through a network of think tanks. Eventually, Buchanan would command millions of dollars annually from the tsars of conservative fundraising, Charles and David Koch, particularly after he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics in 1986. Buchanan, with the help of his wealthy backers, transformed the economics departments he led from staid quantitative backwaters to aggressively, and unabashedly, ideological spaces on the political frontlines. The goal of this movement was not just to demolish the welfare state but to bring down the entire federal government with it.