Like it or lump it, Catholicism is enormously influential in Australia. This is true even just in terms of raw statistics. The Catholic Church is the largest religious body in the country, with 22.6% of the population self-reporting as Catholic in the 2016 Census. It is also Australia’s largest non-government employer, with around 230,000 people working for the church (ACCIR, 2017). This figure excludes voluntary organisations such as the St Vincent de Paul Society with 20,736 members and 41,152 volunteers (SVP, 2016). However, despite the popular stereotype, Australian Catholicism is not a monolith controlled from Rome. It is a vast amalgam of semi-independent entities – dioceses, parishes, missions, religious orders, lay organisations – all with varying degrees of autonomy.

Almost uniquely in the world, Australian governments fund around seventy per cent of the church’s work, its ‘ministry’ or ‘mission’ in theological jargon. Only dioceses and parishes are self-funded. What justifies this vast enterprise that governments, theoretically, could run themselves? The Catholic claim is that, inspired by the Gospel, the church is offering an alternative to state-run, secular institutions. But what specifically is this alternative? And what does it imply for the separation of church and state in a pluralist democracy like Australia?

There are no sheep grazing anywhere near the shepherd’s hut of Tim Winton’s new novel. A few wild goats in the desolate landscape, some broken machinery: that’s all. The narrator, fifteen-year-old Jaxie Clackton, prime suspect for killing his abusive father, is on the run from the police. His scanty food supplies have dwindled almost to nothing and he is desperate for water. He has no gun and his only knife is no use for hunting.

101, Taipei

after the Mandopop song ‘Centrifugal Force’ (Yang Naiwen, 2016)

Happiness in wanting to say something but not saying it. I want to say
happiness in a way others cannot. You look up at my blue-green glass,
double-paned and glazed, and think we, even when someone
jumps, are never on the sane page. Of course, I look like
a huge magic wand that grows a sad rose. Yes, the rose
is dyed, at best. No, there is no rose. I, who have grieved
for the softness of streets replaced by purpose and shops, know
you will one day lie face down with your beautiful eyebrows.
Others think the body bag that does the job is plastic art,
but it is the zip, its reverence tossing us away from the implied
cause. Do you know the 21st century took our belongings inside?
If, as Mary Ruefle says, we are to be exact with the price
of a thing (be it a rooster plate, a kind rope, or, better, songs
about life not smooth as a tattoo) by adding 99 cents
to what it is already worth to make it feel more real,
you wonder what the steel of that one senseless floor
is for. For long, I have become where your soft spots
whisper We are metaphors or Take us, before, all winter long,
raw anticipation aches, sees nothing. An unbecoming. To some,
it is less sad. I am still the same set, same scene and torque
groping and tending the moon in Ourselves. Their selves.
To you, just another phallus? One that jokingly stands.
All seasons are equally good for waiting and missing out –
how you are here early, as if waiting for the world to come
down with its legs up, for the thing in your head to be heard.
It is hard to see a swaying hand in a crowd; everyone now crawls
towards everyone less sad-looking. Yes, the rain gets you
nothing. You are a living construct that mellows street lights.
Shouldn’t you be going home, where questions are decades old?
The ones you are expecting will not come. They are a list
by a kid to keep you soaked to the bone – the star
barista, the edgy clerk, the entrepreneur who burns
family pictures. People come with their cameras to frame
the circumference of their open despair. I close a door
behind you, but it is conservative to say only the natural world
matters. I am famous. I appear in maps. Come,
didn’t you say I speed up happiness with a city view?
Beneath me, a male world thrums with every strung kind.

Nicholas Wong

Nicholas Wong is the author of Crevasse (Kaya Press, 2015), winner of the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. He is also the recipient of the Hong Kong Young Artist Award in Literary Arts in 2017. Wong has contributed writing to the radio composition project ‘One of the Two Stories, Or Both’ at Manchester International Festival 2017, and the final exhibition of Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which will open in May 2018. He is the Vice President of PEN Hong Kong, and teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong

Compass

'Follow the water.'
                           NASA

I

My mother lowered me into the water.
She put me on my back. Some instinct
held my neck rigid and my head up.

The photograph is lost. In the album
of my mind I see the panic in my fists.
I still feel the cold of the water around me.

II

He said we would play a game.
We all jumped. He held my hand, tight.

At the bottom, we counted. Bubbles
silvered to the surface. Then, I ran out

of air. I couldn’t wrench free. On his way
up, he kicked me. The water: so heavy.

III

In the afternoons it was my joy
to fill the small kettle and carry it
to my grandfather in the living room.

He’d put it on the hotplate, bring
the water to the boil. Tea leaves in the pot.
The scent of bamboo. The bitter brew.

IV

My father always said: where there is water,
there are Chinese people; where there are Chinese,
there are Hakka people. I have five phrases:
eat, sleep, shower, shit, I don’t understand.

To count out the numbers: we peel the yams.
Boil them, mash them, add flour and knead
into dough. The women in a line, moulding
the dimpled balls. I never understood the fuss.
Oil coats my lips, my teeth and my tongue.

V

I feel the loss of the bathtub most of all.
On winter mornings, I would wake and run
a hot bath. Unbearable, blistering heat.

Steam rising from water. Salt dissolving
instantly. The sublime immersion –
a return to the womb, or a coffin.

VI

At three o’clock in the morning
my grandmother decided to scrub
the bathroom floor. Water, traitor.

She slipped, cut her forehead open
on a pipe, then landed on her face.
Blood, and two black eyes.

This woman has fought all her life.
At night, she wrestles with her selves.
Sweat soaks her bedclothes.

VII

I never knew I tasted sweet.
Like honey from the rock –

Dry sermons droning overhead
while I silently read the Song

of Songs, Psalms, Proverbs.
Verses like the tides. My first

poetry, the ocean of my undoing.
At the bottom: a tin compass,
its needle wild and searching.

Eileen Chong

Eileen Chong is a Sydney poet who was born in Singapore of Chinese descent. She speaks English, Singlish, Mandarin, and Hokkien, but only writes in English. Chong took a Master of Letters at the University of Sydney and was a recipient of an Australian Postgraduate Award for a Doctorate in Creative Arts at Western Sydney University. She eventually left her academic studies to write poetry full-time. Her poetry collections are Burning Rice (2012), Peony (2014), and Painting Red Orchids (2016), all from Pitt Street Poetry.

The Abstract Blue Background

Hans Holbein the Younger, England, c.1526

A shade greener than Kingfisher (that blue
is not a pigment but a structure, a transparent material
                 combing the loved
                 known wavelengths). This is mineral azurite.
Copper resinate, lead white, lampblack, Cologne earth and vermilion:
A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling.
Anne Lovell most likely; with her three-squirrel escutcheon and a home in
East Harling, a native pun or a foreign error that adhered,
mutually charming. Either way,
                 a starling’s barely heard
                 in the mind’s sub-blue afterward.
Squirrel and Starling were painted when Lady was gone
(standing slowing shaking her layers to make the stiff outer stand straight).
See the held squirrel afloat in space, forever now less squirrel
                 more Object (Paris 1936;
                 fur-covered teacup, saucer and spoon);
the Lady’s pet is an afterthought on a fine-wrought chain.
                 Blue’s pet is that sky
dragged indoors through the keyhole and made
to sit still as abstract, in a green pose it cannot hold.
The squirrel’s tail is between the Lady’s breasts
(by a thousand almost-touches) pointing upwards to the opening
                 of the ermine cap, disregarding
                 the face in its opening
for pure opening.
The blue disregards the subject too and all procedure.
                 She’s a column of time with a little sway (the first layer):
                 a thick sun-frayed cord of a nervous system flapping:
                 a flesh tone that is lead white shot through
with vermilion drawn fresh from a rock vein (the last layer surely):
                 a roused un-blue (the mouth-to-mouth was purely
thaumaturgical, there was
no touching, she is no beauty):
                 a completed madonna, holding
                 something else’s child. (Well it’s done now.)
If it is Anne Lovell she is one year a mother; that is, fleshly returned
as woman in fine sewn couplings of mammal skin, in black bodice
that is collected soot. Each candle flame’s
thumbprint, taken, scraped, all the nights
it took Holbein.
                  The blue is above feeling moved,
above texture, above velvet and ermine and linen, the dyeable the dead;
above the compact of cap, shawl and bodice
as christ was always already above the concerns of his mother
(harmonious as an upended
                   pietà pyramid.)
                   The blue, inspired, kicks its own can over.
If Holbein was no longer sure, still he hurried off for the court
of a fallible king, less perilous
                   than facing
                   an objective blue.
Blue’s explanation: an inner prompting got palpable,
got out of hand, got too enthralling, was executed perfectly
to be more alive, then had no option left
                   but ascension.
The scientific age cannot explain a cult of beauty
any further with its infrared. Plain sight is hiding in blue.

LK Holt

LK Holt lives in Melbourne, where she was born in 1982. Her first collection of poems, Man Wolf Man, won the 2009 Kenneth Slessor Prize in the NSW Premier’s Awards. Patience, Mutiny shared the 2011 Grace Leven Prize for Poetry. Her most recent collection Keeps was longlisted for the 2015 Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. Her forthcoming collection, System Garden, will be published by Vagabond Press later this year.

Decoding Paul Klee’s Mit Grünen Strümpfen (With Green Stockings) 1939

Her green stockinged legs are the conduit
their electric energy like tree sap
pulsing with live yearning that
powers upwards, upwards and through
her body’s little girl trunk
encased in its wide, fine line pinafore
daubed in soft pink and saxe blue splotches.

Higher and higher the strong current surges
into her tuning fork arms charged in yellow
exalting the big green sun daubed also in blue
and her long russet hair falls to one side of her head
while her round ink smudged eyes fix her goal
as explicitly as green stockinged legs hold her firm
and her little girl voice announces ‘I want it.’

Katherine Healy

Katherine Healy is a writer living in the Adelaide Hills. She has worked in education, community health promotion, and counselling. Katherine has published creative non-fiction, short fiction, and poetry. She gained her Master of Letters in Creative Writing from Central Queensland University and credits the rural city of Rockhampton for reawakening her poetic impulse. Katherine is a member of Writers’ SA. She has a poetry collection and a novel as a works-in-progress.

breather

1.
The only thing left of god by then was the key to a hotel room. Is it worth saying the room
was turquoise & smelt like us coming in an arthouse film, a space for everything bad about
deconstruction & lamplit polyester unfringed with irony. All I wanted was your fingers inside
me like ten wet disciples.
*
Brick room with skin diptych. I could catalogue everything squalid. Chintzy pelt of the
superking. Diaspora of insects round the bulb like core samples. Cheesy pallor of formica
coffee tables, nested. Drapes avocado as an old bruise. Oh let us tour the cutlery drawer in all
its nickel ammunition. Smell of your torso pay-by-the-hour along mine.
*
‘I just had the weirdest five minute dream. You were giving me a blowjob in an asylum.’
*
I meant for this to happen & happen. Adjacent to your tongue tip there’s zero I care about.
Indigo fishhooked the carpet’s sky blue crime & no soliloquy of guilt would stop us getting
the wet skin we’d paid for. Everyone we owed was out of range. Under us a pub the colour of
a cellblock. Easy. Just slip off the lace of thinking twice.

2.
Call your wife, can you fill up the diesel, she needs it for ballet practice tonight. Call your
wife, the goddamn taps in the ensuite have jammed again, can you just for once. Call your
wife, she is solo in the ritualised kitchen where the lights have blown out. Call your wife,
leave a message at the sob. Call your wife, she is learning the hard way. Call your wife, the
histology is back. Call your wife, her lipstick is audible. Call your wife, she’s on her third
bottle & the kids are starting to look like stars. Call your wife, she remembers the colour of
the wallpaper in neonatal. Call your wife, she is talking to you with her head tipped back so
you don’t hear the asphyxia. Call your wife, she has access to the archives. Call your wife,
because there will be a tomorrow. Call your wife, she has a thing for Sinatra. Call your wife,
to hear her mohair voice. Call your wife, your account is in the red. Call your wife, she is
right where you left her. Call your wife, in the living room simmering, she is the house set
alight said aloud. Oops, we encountered a problem, try again in 3,2,1 to. Call your wife, she
will not ask again, she will try to sound futile, this is love not surveillance, she is holding an
hourglass, she is hewn from decent clothes, while I put you in my mouth, she is stranded in
the blueprints, it’ll be a quick fix, the kids need picking up from the smoke. Call your wife,
she will speak at your funeral. Fuck me hard, then call your wife.

Tracey Slaughter

Tracey Slaughter is a poet and short story writer from Cambridge, New Zealand. Her work has received numerous awards, including the international Bridport Prize (2014), shortlistings for the Manchester Prize in both Poetry (2014) and Fiction (2015), and two Katherine Mansfield Awards. Her latest work, the short story collection deleted scenes for lovers (Victoria University Press) was published to critical acclaim in 2016, and was longlisted for the Ockham NZ Book Awards. She is currently putting the finishing touches to a poetry collection entitled ‘conventional weapons’. She teaches at the University of Waikato, where she edits the literary journal Mayhem.

After a succession of dramatic political events across the Western world in 2016, all eyes were on the French presidential election when it took place in the first half of 2017. Would the French resist the sirens of populism? Would the surprise campaign of the youngest candidate ever, Emmanuel Macron, offer a vision strong enough to lift the European continent out of the crisis into which it was plunged by the Greek financial crisis and the Brexit referendum? Would it rescue liberalism in the new political environment heralded by Donald Trump’s election?

Macron’s success after a dramatic contest was greeted with much relief within Europe and beyond. The man himself became a celebrity, his personality and personal life scrutinised by the media across the world triggering a global ‘Macron mania’. Little attention was paid, though, to the fact that he had won largely by default: first, thanks to the lack of credibility of the candidates chosen by the two main parties during their bloody primaries; then because of the extraordinarily lucky break opened by the corruption allegations levelled at the leading candidate of the centre right, the veteran politician François Fillon.

Eyes to the future

As our fortieth birthday celebrations get underway, we have much pleasure in naming Beejay Silcox as the recipient of the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellowship worth $10,000. Beejay, who first wrote for us in 2016, has quickly become a regular in our pages, and elsewhere. Her short story ‘Slut Trouble’ was commended in the 2016 Jolley Prize. She has lived in more than a dozen cities across three continents and recently completed her MFA in the United States.

Beejay Silcox will contribute several articles and review essays this year, commencing with a survey of magazine culture in our 400th issue (April).

On accepting the Fellowship, she told Advances: ‘We live in an age of outrage, and while much of it seems petty and partisan, some of it is revolutionary. The faults and fault-lines of our political moment offer profound opportunities for literary and critical insight. Below the dysfunction and rage, a new generation of authors is writing the stories that will come to define our time, and us. They’re writing to make sense of the tumult, to unmask dark grievances, lurking cruelties, and wellsprings of change. ABR has an increasingly global reach; it showcases Australian culture to the world, and brings the world back home. The magazine is also a powerful moral compass in Australia’s cultural landscape, from environmental conservation to same-sex marriage to its ongoing support of young writers. It is a privilege to be involved with ABR as it enters its fifth decade, eyes to the future.’

Porter Prize

This year, our valiant judges in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize – John Hawke, Jen Webb, and Bill Manhire – had almost 1,000 poems to assess before choosing the shortlist. It was our largest field to date (the Porter Prize goes back to 2005). And what a shortlist it is, beginning on page 30. There are five poems, and the poets reflect the international nature of this ABR competition. They are Eileen Chong (Sydney), Katherine Healy (Adelaide), LK Holt (Melbourne), Tracey Slaughter (New Zealand), and Nicholas Wong (Hong Kong). The shortlist has been publised in our March 2018 issue.

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize shortlist (left to right): Eileen Chong (photograph by Charlene Winfred Photography), Katherine Healy (photograph by Ben Liew Photography, Adelaide), LK Holt (photograph by Nicholas Walton-Healey), Tracey Slaughter, Nicholas Wong (photograph by Sum at Grainy Studio)

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne on Monday, 19 March (6 pm). This is a free event, but bookings are essential: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. After readings from the work of Peter Porter by colleagues and admirers of the late poet, the shortlisted poets will introduce and read their poems. Then Louis Klee – co-winner of the 2017 Porter Prize – will name the overall winner, who will receive $5,000, and the runner-up ($2,000).

RAFT essays

In September 2016 we published the first ABR RAFT Fellowship Essay: ‘How Do We Live with Ourselves? Australia’s national conscience’ by distinguished historian Alan Atkinson. Fourteen months later followed ‘If This Is a Jew: Progressive Judaism around the world’ by Elisabeth Holdsworth, inaugural winner of the Calibre Essay Prize.

Such was the quality of the field in the 2017 RAFT Fellowship that we decided to award two additional ones: ‘Beyond Songlines’ by Philip Jones (published in September 2017 with support from the ABR Patrons) and Paul Collins’s article ‘God and Caesar in Australia: The close nexus between government and Catholicism’, which we are pleased to be able to publish in this issue as the third ABR RAFT Fellowship.

We thank the Religious Advancement Foundation Trust for gifting us and readers with these three compelling and very different articles, and for allowing the individual Fellows to devote the requisite time to themes of considerable moment.

Films galore

Our theme in May is Film and Television. The guest editor is James McNamara, a past ABR Fellow whose long article ‘The Golden Age of Television?’ appeared in our April 2015 issue. In addition to a wide range of reviews, commentaries, and articles, we will invite some leading film critics and professionals to nominate their favourite film.

To complement this feature,we want to hear from readers about their favourite films. All you have to do is vote online at: http://bit.ly/2Czft1k. One film per person please, and no television, despite the merits of The West Wing, True Detective, The Sopranos, House of Cards, etc.

There are some fantastic prizes, including a one-year Palace VIP Card thanks to our friends at Palace Films. You have until 7 May to vote, and the overall winner will announced later in May.

Democratic magic

‘The poet’s public’s gone,’ Randall Jarrell wrote cheerfully in ‘Poets, Critics and Readers’, and that was decades ago. But was he right? According to a new volume titled Who Reads Poetry: 50 views from Poetry magazine, lots of people read the stuff – and need it in their lives. They include actors, anthropologists, cartoonists, journalists, art professors, neurosurgeons, photo-conceptual artist, soldiers – even economists.

Who Reads Poetry (University of Chicago Press/Footprint, $49.99 hb), edited by Fred Sasaki and Don Share (the latter is also Editor of Poetry magazine), features writers such as Roxane Gay, who says gallantly: ‘Even when I am confounded by a poem, it changes my world in some way.’ Christopher Hitchens was an inveterate memoriser of poetry: swathes of Auden, Owen, and the Bible. Predictably, no one writes better than Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker. Wallace Stevens he considers ‘the most innately musical of poets’. Ross writes: ‘I’ve long believed that I write what I read, and Stevens is the magic well from which I draw. He teaches the implacable power of the iambic meter, the heft of monosyllables, the democratic magic of the English tongue.’

David McCooey, who knows a thing or two about the music of poetry (as well as music), will review Who Reads Poetry for ABR.

And why does poetry retain its unique allure? Judith Wright’s words come to mind: ‘Poetry is one of the last subjective tasks in a time devoted to the object.’

Take two!

ABR now partners with six other periodicals in offering discounted dual subscriptions. They are Griffith Review, Island, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Overland, and Westerly. We’re thrilled that so many readers have taken up these special offers. Magazines require lots of things – great writers, good nerves, sound roofs, etc. – but most of all they need subscribers. Without the ‘pleasant twaddle of magazines’ (Henry James), where would our younger writers be – not to mention readers? As Cyril Connolly once wrote: ‘Little magazines are the pollinators of works of art: literary movements and eventually literature itself could not exist without them.’

My name's Muriel Spark

Few authors welcome biographies. Many regard them as invasive, militant, otiose. Muriel Spark was a particularly unlikely subject. A lifelong chameleon, she guarded her privacy and sought to hide details of her fraught relations with her only child. Yet in 1993, out of the blue, she appointed Martin Stannard, whom she did not know, as her official biographer. The timing was odd, for she had just published the first volume of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae. Spark encouraged Stannard to treat her as though she was already dead – and he did. It was an unhappy autopsy.

Muriel Spark, (1918–2006)Now, Alan Taylor – Editor of the Scottish Review of Books – has written an affectionate memoir of his friendship with Spark, which began in 1990 and lasted until her death in 2006. Appointment in Arezzo: A friendship with Muriel Spark (Polygon/NewSouth, $29.99 hb) captures her glamour, her inextinguishable Scottishness, and her devotion to writing. In her eighties, Spark was still plotting new novels. She told Taylor: ‘The difficulty of starting a book is getting the tone. It’s like tuning up. It’s very like music, a book, you know. You really have to have a balance, a rhythm. First of all, are you going to tell it in the first person ... If you want to attract a lot of sympathy to a character, the first person is unbeatable. If you’re going to tell it in the third person, then who are you? You’re not really the author. My name’s Muriel Spark and it’s not that.’

Such clarity, such un-highfalutin resolve, gave us twenty-two inimitable novels, the short stories (many of them published first in The New Yorker), and some exquisite poems. The latter hardly rate in the adamantine anthologies, yet on her tombstone in Civitella (Spark lived in Tuscany for almost forty years), beneath her name, there is one word: Poeta.

Shortly after Sigmund Freud’s death in 1939, W.H. Auden published an elegy to the famous Viennese refugee. Auden’s Freud is flawed and fallible – ‘He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told / the unhappy Present to recite the Past’ – but unquestionably great. ‘If some traces of the autocratic pose, / the paternal strictness he distrusted, still / clung to his utterance and features, / it was a protective coloration / for one who’d live among enemies so long: / if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd / to us he is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion.’

The appearance in 2014 of In Certain Circles, a new novel from Elizabeth Harrower, was an important literary event. The author, who still lives in Sydney, had published nothing since 1966 and had repeatedly maintained that she had nothing more to say. In Certain Circles had been ready for publication in 1971, but Harrower withdrew it. In interviews over the intervening period, she gave a number of reasons for this decision but remained adamant that no one could read the manuscript. Fortunately, Michael Heyward at Text Publishing, who had recently reprinted her four earlier novels, persuaded her otherwise. Text published handsome hardback editions of In Certain Circles and A Few Days in the Country and other stories (2015), a collection of her short stories, more than half of which had appeared for the first time in that same year. With these two new books, and the republication of her small but powerful oeuvre, it is time to ask how we now understand Harrower’s achievement and, as a consequence, how we might reconfigure the picture of mid-century Australian fiction.

In his new account of Donald Trump’s presidency, Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff describes how Trump’s ‘adviser’ Steve Bannon counselled fellow White House newbies to read The Best and The Brightest as preparation for their administration’s tasks. Rarely for the mordant Bannon, his enthusiasm for David Halberstam’s 1972 classic of the West Wing mandarinate who mangled the Vietnam War seems have been unfeigned and unironic. ‘A very moving experience reading this book,’ Wolff quotes Bannon as saying, ‘It makes the world clear, amazing characters and all true.’

Is anyone likely to say the same of Wolff’s rapid-fire reportage of the Trump White House? Not in forty-five years, that’s for sure; maybe, at a pinch, for forty-five minutes. The book has apparently already sold nearly two million copies, benefiting enormously from Trump’s reflex threats of legal action and suppression. Yet so extensively have its contents been parsed that the very little new in it already seems old, while the old lies dead on the page. Trump is a deluded solipsist surrounded by cretinous enablers and epigones. Colour me amazed.

It was the year an American presidential candidate declared: ‘We got too much dignity in government now; what we need is some meanness.’ Even without this call to arms, meanness was abundant. A prominent journalist, on live television, derided a rival as a ‘queer’ and harangued him for having written a novel about a transsexual. The mayor of Chicago screamed, ‘Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch,’ at a senator. A leading Republican privately told a journalist to ‘ask a psychiatrist’ about one of his party’s candidates. Another Republican said the party’s presidential nominee could not lose unless ‘he committed rape in public’. The Republican vice-presidential candidate called a Japanese-American reporter a ‘fat Jap’.

Violence was plentiful, too, at home and abroad. The United States was mired in an unwinnable war and riven by political divisions that erupted into street battles and riots. The Democratic Party fissured between an establishment candidate and an insurgency rooted in a youth revolt. Media guru Roger Ailes orchestrated an election campaign that blurred the lines between politics and entertainment. An actor tried to be taken seriously as a national politician.

To the layperson, the shifts and variations in government policy and its effects on Aboriginal lives can be bewildering, even during the past decade. Tim Rowse has done a great service by analysing more than a century of this tangled history, locating its patterns and its driving forces and making sense of it. He has produced a humane and convincing account of the demographic and social recovery of an Aboriginal population as it absorbed and accommodated the effects of intrusive social policies. At one level, Indigenous and Other Australians since 1901 provides a coherent account of the origins, implications, and outcomes of Aboriginal policy formation since Federation, ranging deftly across state and territory jurisdictions, decade by decade.

It is now widely believed that Russia and its agents interfered with the 2016 US presidential election to help Donald Trump get elected. In Collusion: How Russia helped Trump win the White House, journalist and author Luke Harding investigates the likelihood that Trump and his associates colluded with Russia to achieve that goal.

It is not an easy task. At first blush, the idea itself seems fantastical – the stuff of Cold War novels or conspiracy theories. Further, Harding is delving into the non-binary world of intelligence, where there are no definite truths, only ‘degrees of veracity’. Identifying and evaluating information from within the murky and incestuous world of post-Soviet Russia – a world where ministers, spies, and oligarchs do Vladimir Putin’s bidding as the sine qua non of survival – presents challenges, as does piercing the veil of Trump’s sprawling, often opaque, business empire.

For upward of a decade, Hugh White has been sounding a warning: that Australia’s long-standing policy of relying on the United States as guarantor of our security in Asia was approaching its use-by date. As a conspicuous relic of European colonial expansion, Australia has always viewed with trepidation the idea that our region’s centre of political gravity might one day tilt back towards China. Where would a country like ours find itself when the historic tide of Western dominance receded? This is a question that many Australians find discomfiting. White deserves credit for his tireless, and mostly thankless, efforts to force it into public view.

In an earlier Quarterly Essay, White outlined the inherent contradiction in our foreign policy – a staunch ally of the United States that relies on China for its economic prosperity – but argued that we might yet find a way out of the predicament, by acting as go-between to negotiate an Asia–Pacific condominium between China and the United States. Power Shift: Australia’s future between Washington and Beijing (QE 39, 2010) came on the heels of a series of events that led some to describe 2009 as an annus horribilis in Australia’s relations with China. With hindsight, those now look like happier days. White’s optimism about the possibility of resolving the contradiction in our stance was only outdone by his critics’  brash dismissal of the very existence of any such contradiction; the illusion that ‘we don’t have to choose’ could still be maintained.

Australians, Chris Bowen lamented recently, pay lip service to Asia. While millions of us visit every year, it is too easy to skim across the region’s surface. Few Australians speak Asian languages; most know little about our colossal neighbour Indonesia, let alone other ASEAN countries. Making matters worse, there is an astonishing dearth of quality books about Southeast Asia for a general audience. The region contains more than 600 million people; its economy is over $US2.4 trillion. Yet between academic monographs and the airbrushed presentations of these societies which appear in Lonely Planet guides there are comparatively few options. The publication of Michael Vatikiotis’s superb Blood and Silk: Power and conflict in modern Southeast Asia is therefore very welcome. Lip service to Asia is not something that can be said of Vatikiotis. With university degrees in Southeast Asian studies, he has spent thirty years in the region working as a journalist then conflict mediator; he speaks fluent Indonesian and Thai.

It is a common misconception that scientists are not writers. As Professor Emma Johnston states in her foreword, writing is a fundamental part of the scientific process and innumerable volumes of scientific journals are published each year. These papers often employ dry, opaque language decipherable only by other scientists, so science journalists wade through these volumes, distilling and translating the latest, most exciting science into language that is accessible and appealing to non-specialist readers. Recent financial cuts to newsrooms have triggered the shedding of subject-specific writers, including science journalists. As a result, the quality and quantity of informed science journalism in Australia has been in decline, despite the dire need for public engagement with scientific ideas and policy. In this context, anthologies such as this are especially significant.

The idea that academia is a meritocracy in which intelligence and hard work will inevitably result in a long and storied career sounds these days like the foundation myth of a dead religion. Inger Mewburn’s How to Be an Academic is a salve for people such as myself who were silly enough to pursue a research career anyway. Bringing together some of the more popular posts from her blog, ‘The Thesis Whisperer’, Mewburn’s book is alternately a survival guide and a resistance manual for the modern university workplace.

It takes only five months for a newt to regrow a lost limb. Skittles and Tic Tacs both made public statements denouncing Donald Trump during the 2016 Presidential race. Psychologists have learned that whenever we believe that a problem – like addiction, domestic abuse, or climate change – is intractable, our brains appear programmed to ignore it. The world’s best freedivers reach depths of 200 metres on a single breath. Australia’s First Peoples are proportionally the most incarcerated on earth. Of Australian surgeons, 91.5 per cent are male. The kea, an alpine parrot from New Zealand, can kill and devour sheep. Australia’s relative average income for people with disabilities is lower than any other OECD nation.

One of the functions of the essay has always been to give readers access to new information, experiences, ways of thinking – even entirely new worlds. The above list, gleaned from The Best Australian Essays 2017, gives some sense of what readers are in for. It’s a sample of the truly odd, infuriating, revealing, depressing, and often startling pieces of information on offer throughout. Though Anna Goldsworthy, in her brief introduction, worries about having made selections that are too personal, the essays are remarkably varied: in tone, style, subject matter, and spirit of approach.

Poets aren’t generally known for being great collaborators. Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798) is a rare example of a co-authored canonical work of poetry. Renga: 100 poems, by John Kinsella and Paul Kane, has some similarities to Lyrical Ballads. Like those of its Romantic precedent, the poems in Renga are single-authored, the collaboration being project-based rather than an exercise in joint composition. Like Lyrical Ballads, Renga reanimates an old form for contemporary times. But unlike Lyrical Ballads, Renga is a work of explicit (and equal) dialogue. Each poet takes his turn in poetic conversation, inspired by the Japanese Renga form, a collaborative venture in which poets take turns composing linked stanzas. As Kane describes in his Foreword (Kinsella gets the Afterword), ‘Call and respond was the modality, though John and I took turns in taking the lead.’

The Old English Beowulf, the most important poem in English before Chaucer, was probably composed in the eighth century. The poem traces Beowulf’s three fights against the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and the dragon. The dragon is defeated, but Beowulf also dies in the battle. The poem ends with an elegiac lament not just for the loss of its hero, but also for the dissolution of the society that he represents.

The language, grammar, and syntax of Old English are so removed from present-day English that most people must experience the poem via a translation, and there have been many of these. The latest is by Stephen Mitchell, a very experienced translator, whose works include translations of the Iliad, Gilgamesh, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Tao Te Ching.

Bani Adam wants to be a ‘chivalrous poet’ or a great writer. These aspirations make the Lebanese-Australian teenager feel like an outsider at the testosterone-fuelled, anti-intellectual high school that he attends. Until he finishes school, Bani bides his time with a group of mostly Muslim and Lebanese young men. ‘The Lebs’, as they refer to themselves, while away the hours discussing religion and politics, fantasising about or insulting teachers, and forging something like a friendship with one another.

The Lebs is the latest novel for Sydney writer and community arts worker Michael Mohammed Ahmad. The author sketches his characters with precision and with a refreshing lack of moralising about their lives. Some of the young men spout misogynist and anti-Semitic opinions. These sentiments are disturbing, but there is no suggestion that they are being endorsed.

The novel shifts from witty to bleak and confronting, and then back, sometimes in the space of a few paragraphs. Ahmad traverses a number of issues – sex, gender, race, and religion – without being didactic. The book is divided into sections with titles such as ‘Drug Dealers and Drive Bys’. These titles could have been lifted from tabloid reports about the supposed horrors of multicultural suburbia. They contrast nicely with the unsensational, though always compelling, events in Bani’s life.

The Lebs’ sense of historicity is fuzzy. At one point, for example, Bani observes his classmates’ reactions to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which, we are told, have just occurred. This would suggest that the novel is set in 2001, but there are also references to Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) and to a 2009 incident featuring radio personality Kyle Sandilands. This aside, The Lebs provides a confronting and admirably frank examination of one young man’s coming of age in contemporary Australia.

'Mrs M’ is the second wife of Lachlan Macquarie, governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. Luke Slattery explains in his Author’s Note the impulse behind his novel – Elizabeth Macquarie’s voice coming to him, romantically, in a dream. It was not quite unprompted. He had been visiting her home territory in the Hebrides, having already written a short book about the Macquaries’ last years in New South Wales (The First Dismissal [2014]). But this book is different; and it is Slattery’s first novel.

Mrs M is an ‘imagined history’, but a skeleton of historical fact is fleshed out in it, with a few inconvenient ribs missing, and some joints slightly realigned. The Dromedary, the ship on which the Macquaries travelled to New South Wales, was not a convict ship, with or without a certain convict architect aboard. Slattery’s Elizabeth suffers from unfruitful pregnancies, as the historical woman did, but Slattery dispenses with the son she actually did bear, along with the real-life architect Francis Greenway’s wife. His Elizabeth is a woman of decided opinions and strong feelings who has grown up solitary and proud as a member of the Campbell clan. She is ruled not so much by social constraints and mores as by her own system of alliances: loyalties she has formed based on deliberate choices she has made.

Early on in this book, the fictional Lale Sokolov, based on the real man of that name who survived Auschwitz and its horrors to eventually live in suburban Melbourne, has his arm tattooed. Aghast, he laments, ‘How can someone do this to another human being?’ He wonders if, ‘for the rest of his life, be it short or long, he will be defined by this moment, this irregular number: 32407’. The story that follows explores this first theme by exposing the nadir of human depravity as represented by the Holocaust’s perpetrators, and refutes his second thought. Although given the loathsome function of the tattooist, Lale lives in opposition to the Nazi fantasy that Jews, Gypsies, and others could thus be reduced to their withered husks; his gestures of kindness and sacrifice flow endlessly towards his fellow inmates and his lifelong love, Gita.

With a regular stream of vulgar tweets from President Trump and a tsunami of sexual harassment charges against prominent men, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the nasty side of masculine privilege in our current world. The narcissistic man who manipulates others to satisfy his sense of power has become a recognised figure in public life. Craig Sherborne’s Off the Record is a satire that relies on reader outrage at such behaviour, but it is hard to avoid a sense that he has been unlucky with the timing of this novel. There are times when the large-scale absurdities of the real world can make a satire look tame. The fictional world Sherborne creates is a kind of petty provincial version of the masculine privilege and bullying behaviour we see in the daily news feed.

Recent years have seen the literary novel begin to mutate, its boundaries and subject matter evolving in new and sometimes surprising directions as it attempts to accommodate the increasing weirdness of the world we inhabit.

In her own, sometimes subterranean way, Jennifer Mills has been one of the architects of this process in Australian writing. Having begun her career with the beautifully constructed but relatively conventional The Diamond Anchor (2009), her work has rapidly grown spikier and less easy to categorise, gathering in elements of the surreal and the science fictional as its ambition has increased.

The early stages of this transformation were visible in Mills’s justly lauded 2013 collection of stories, The Rest Is Weight, as well as in more recent short fiction published in the late, lamented Review of Australian Fiction and elsewhere. Mills’s new novel, Dyschronia, sees her leave behind the niceties of literary realism altogether, venturing instead into the unsettled – and unsettling – hinterland of the fantastic.

Set in the fictional South Australian town of Clapstone, the novel centres on Sam, a young woman afflicted with a disturbed awareness of time. Mostly manifesting itself in the context of crippling migraines accompanied by powerful aura-like effects, Sam’s condition is less prescience or augury than what one of the many doctors her mother, Ivy, consults in search of a diagnosis dubs ‘dyschronia’, a psychic disturbance in which Sam experiences or inhabits several time-frames simultaneously.

Initially, these visions are more disturbing to others than they are to Sam. As she grows older this changes. Sam first becomes aware of the way her altered awareness isolates her from those around her; then, as the visions slowly become less frequent, she is haunted by their absence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Sam’s visions are also of interest to the other inhabitants of Clapstone, especially when she predicts a series of suicides. But when the plausible and charming Ed appears in town and learns of her abilities, he sees other possibilities as well. Although he is careful to keep the details of his past vague, Ed claims to have worked in finance in London, followed by a stint consulting in Hong Kong. His reasons for being in Clapstone are never fully clear – at one point, he laughs it off as a midlife crisis – but he has big plans for the place, plans that rely upon Sam’s ability to predict the future.

For the town’s inhabitants, Ed’s plans are a lifeline. Clapstone has always been a marginal place, its history shaped by a succession of failed attempts to reshape and harness the land. Ruined first by agriculture, Clapstone in recent times has been blighted by the construction and subsequent closure of an asphalt refinery just outside the town, an enterprise that affected the health of the locals but at least offered work.

The novel’s portrait of Clapstone’s breakdown is powerfully and evocatively drawn. Mills has a keen eye for the particularity of the landscape. While her sympathy for the inhabitants of Clapstone is genuine, a deep vein of anger runs through the novel, giving real power to its insistence we recognise the degree to which the ruination of the landscape – and indeed the larger silences that lie behind it – are simply manifestations of the colonial project and capitalism. Importantly, though, the effects of these processes are juxtaposed with the cycles of the natural world, in particular the annual migration of the giant cuttlefish that breed in the area each winter.

At first, the townsfolk are only dimly aware of the existence of the cuttlefish, but as Ed’s plans and Sam’s visions begin to converge, their presence – and later, absence – becomes more significant.

Jennifer Mills

The alien otherness of the cuttlefish glides through the fabric of Dyschronia, echoing not just the strangeness of Sam’s condition, but the way its flashes of ‘migrainous light’ are also intimations of something deeper, ‘leucophores, iridophores, chromataphores, swimming backward through the dark. Cellular interference, strange signals, like a language lost to the rest of her species ... in the ocean beneath, there are other, less articulate desires ... flickering things, dimly lit from within.’

Dyschronia’s cuttlefish resonate intriguingly with two significant Australian novels published in 2017, Krissy Kneen’s An Uncertain Grace and Jane Rawson’s From the Wreck, both of which drew in similar ways upon the tropes of the weirder end of science fiction. Some of these resonances are superficial: Rawson’s novel also features cephalopods, albeit extraterrestrial, dimension-hopping cephalopods, while Kneen’s is suffused with the presence of jellyfish, as well as various forms of virtuality and artificial intelligence. But these surface similarities disguise a closer congruence of concern. These non-human presences help shift the perspectives of the novels in fascinating and suggestive ways by forcing us to grapple with both the existence of other, non-human perspectives and, just as importantly, other temporalities.

With quietly devastating elegance, Dyschronia reminds us that time and place are really two sides of the same coin: as Sam realises midway through the novel, her disorder is really ‘a product of geography, a disease of place. She’s only ever lived here, seen this place’s futures. Dyschronia springs from a crack in its earth.’ But its vision of a world transformed by human activity also allows us to grasp the degree to which the ecological crisis that surrounds us deranges our notions of scale, collapsing geological and human time in unpredictable and often terrifying ways. That it manages to do this while still making space for the hope and possibility embedded in its final pages is a measure of the achievement of this intellectually rich and stylistically thrilling novel.

This is a playful, intelligent, unsettling series of stories, fourteen of them, collected from publications going back a few decades from 1987 until 2012 as well as, presumably, unpublished work. Due in part to this long span, the book traces back and forth through time. There is even a Sydney pre-Opera House (just) in one story, and various social and cultural artefacts and processes come and go.

For the most part, Skovron uses understated, non-flashy prose rather than, dare I say, ‘poetic’ prose, and these stories are the better for that. He is, of course, much more well-known as one of Australia’s pre-eminent poets. This is his first collection of short stories; he has previously published a novella, The Poet (2005). Not only does Skovron demonstrate talent with prose but he is also an artist; the book’s charming cover illustration, called ‘Clock’, is his own work as well.

In this collection of more than thirty pieces of fiction, journalism, criticism, academic papers, and ephemera (acceptance speeches, parliamentary questions, university course outlines), Frank Moorhouse gives evidence of, and attempts to explain, the durability of Henry Lawson’s classic short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in Australian cultural life. Moorhouse’s interest encompasses not only the persistence of Lawson’s story, but also the many ways in which it has lingered by being constantly reinvented – both reverently and otherwise – to the point where he declares that it has become ‘a phenomenon unique in the Australian artistic imagination’.

Leaving aside Moorhouse’s calculated overstatement, we can accept that from its publication in 1892 ‘The Drover’s Wife’ was destined to be more than a straightforward condensation of Bulletin-era realism or a frequently anthologised utterance from Australia’s bard. Lawson’s story ticked an unreasonable number of boxes in terms of making literature from the Australian uncanny. It describes distance without end, days without change, and isolation without relief. It deals with a woman’s lot, an absent father, perishing dreams, violent death, the Indigenous ‘other’, a dog called Alligator, and the most Freudian of snakes. This is a load for any 3,000-word fiction to carry, but even today (or perhaps more so today) the reader is struck by the story’s remarkable economy. It conveys the themes with an efficiency that can seem almost inconceivable at a time when these themes come burdened with the accretion of over a century of theory, appropriation, disputation, and fashion.

When the first volume in the Tales of the City series was published in 1978, Armistead Maupin tells us disarmingly in his new memoir, it flopped. Yet the series, which had begun as a newspaper serial in 1974, continued for a decade, with three more recent books bringing us up to date on the fate of the major characters. Meanwhile, Tales of the City led to several television miniseries starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis. (Netflix is making a new version, with both those actors.) Along the way, Maupin became one of the best-known gay authors in the world.

The premise of the series was deceptively simple: take an extended household of characters living through a period of rapid social change, and relate their interwoven stories. Tales reflected the rise of San Francisco as the gay centre of the world, and played a pioneering role in popular culture in confronting shifts in the sexual and gender Zeitgeist.

The old narrative goes that first we were hunter–gatherers, then we discovered farming, then agricultural communities ‘progressed’ to states and, eventually, industrial cities. This ‘progression’ is supposedly how humans became ‘civilised’. This old narrative has been debunked by many. In Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states, James C. Scott explores why the ideas of progression and superiority of civilisation don’t make sense. He examines the key characteristics that made early states possible, the risks and rewards of sedentary life, and the two-way street between hunter–gatherer and farmer.

Against the Grain focuses on the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, in the years 6,500 to 1,600 BCE. Australian readers seeking a better understanding of our own deep history and context in the world will be disappointed. The whole Southern Hemisphere barely rates a mention.

Re-visiting Delphi. The re-iteration is plain necessity: if Italo Calvino is correct and the classics can only ever be reread, then even a first-time visitor to Delphi is revisiting it. That evocative sanctuary barely clinging to the slopes of Parnassus is simultaneously place and commonplace (the Greek topos encompasses both senses). In Julia Kindt’s hands, Delphi is less a space than a stage set: a platform for the Pythia’s oracular pronouncements and a backdrop to the stories of those who went to consult her. These oracular stories have won their way to becoming archetypes: Herodotus’s self-delusional Croesus attacking Persia after being assured that in doing so he will destroy a great empire; Plato’s diffident Socrates, named by the Pythia as second-to-none in his wisdom; and the panicked Athenians, knowing only that a ‘wall of wood’ will save them from the Persians, being persuaded by Themistocles – opportunistically? – that Apollo is instructing them to man their fleet and decamp to Salamis rather than retreat to fortify the Isthmus or trust in the defensive capabilities of the Acropolis.

Vivian Maier has received the kind of attention most photographers and artists can only dream of – multiple monographs, documentary films, commercial gallery representation, extraordinary public interest, and now a biography. However, all this activity and acclaim has occurred posthumously. In her lifetime Maier’s mammoth output, estimated at 150,000 photographic exposures and hundreds of reels of silent movie footage, wasn’t known. She didn’t take photographs for public consumption, for publication, or for exhibition – she took them for herself. Photography was her obsession, but its outcomes came perilously close to total obliteration. Maier – ill, old, and poor – was unable to meet the payments on her storage units in Chicago and so, without her knowledge, the contents were sent to auction where small-time collectors purchased her undeveloped films, negatives, and prints. This alone explains her attraction; the mysteriousness of her origins and her secretive life as the ‘nanny photographer’ have only increased it.

Richard Avedon never considered himself a photographer, much less (the horror!) a fashion photographer, yet in sixty years of peripatetic productivity (1944–2004) he revolutionised that field and reinvented photographic portraiture. His work in the fashion industry – as a photographer and, often, creative director of advertising campaigns for Versace, Calvin Klein, and Dior, among others – brought fame and the money to fund the projects that nourished him and for which Avedon believed he would be remembered.

‘He realized that his fame was built around that accomplishment, which was, after all, very real and very large and quite remarkable, but he also knew that being a fashion photographer was, in the universe of fame, a strange thing to be,’ writes Adam Gopnik, one of the nearly dozen voices who eulogise Avedon at the end of Norma Stevens and Steven M.L. Aronson’s controversial and engrossing biography.

Richard Davis is admirably determined that major Australian musical artists whose careers were attenuated by illness should not fade into oblivion. In Wotan’s Daughter (2012), he chronicled the career of Marjorie Lawrence, afflicted by polio just as she had become one of the world’s leading dramatic sopranos. Now, in Close to the Flame, he has given us a biography of Stuart Challender (1947–91), whose undoubted talent was beginning to be recognised internationally as he succumbed to AIDS. But whereas Lawrence’s pre-polio performances took place entirely overseas, the major part of Challender’s career was in Australia, and his influence on Australian performers and composers was profound.

What was your pathway to publishing?

My first job in publishing was a paid editorial internship with legal house CCH in the early 1990s. It taught me a lot: not least the importance of being meticulous (and earnest). However, the glitz and glamour of trade publishing caught my eye and I soon jumped ship, spending twelve or so years at HarperCollins, Hardie Grant, and Pan Macmillan before co-founding Brio in 2011.

What was the first book you published?

I was an editor long before I became a publisher and had the good fortune of working on dozens of terrific books, but one title I championed early on in my career at HarperCollins was a picaresque novel called Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian (translated by Sydney University academic Mabel Lee). We released the book in July 2000. Three months later, Gao Xingjian won the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Every single one of them. As a small independent house, we necessarily take a very hands-on approach.

There have been more than 600 publications on Hamlet in the last five years alone. Uniquely amongst Shakespeare’s plays, Hamlet even has an entire journal devoted to it: Hamlet Studies. Offering something new in these circumstances takes courage. Drawing inspiration from Margreta de Grazia’s liberation of Hamlet from the anachronistic concerns of Romantic and post-Romantic critics (2007), Rhodri Lewis offers a striking account of the ‘unusual and arresting’ qualities of the Danish prince in terms of Shakespeare’s ‘dissatisfaction with various forms of late-sixteenth-century humanist convention’. Inverting the usual paradigm which limns Hamlet as an unwilling or unable revenger who cannot make up his own mind, Lewis prefers to characterise the play as ‘a tragedy in which Shakespeare confronts his audiences with the realization that they have no fixed points of reference with which to help them make up theirs’. Hamlet is at odds with the humanist moral philosophy of its time, yielding a ‘troubled portrait of human identity’.

Australia’s role in the war against the Ottoman Empire from 1916 to 1918 is much less widely understood than its contribution to the doomed campaign in the Dardanelles or the muddy slog on the Western Front. It is one aspect of Australia’s World War I that has not been overwritten by historians (loosely termed), and thus offers Jonathan King considerable scope to make a meaningful contribution to Australia’s popular understanding of World War I. Unfortunately and unsurprisingly given how much pulp history the centenary of World War I has generated, the result is farcical.

There are endless possibilities that could have been considered in a book such as this. How did the experience of warfare for the Anzacs fighting in the Mediterranean differ from that of those fighting on the Western Front? How did the soldiers react to conquering the Holy Lands? Did they regard themselves as modern-day crusaders crushing the heathens, or as agents of the British Empire, vanquishing the Ottomans? How did they react to the landscape, and to the variety of inhabitants that they encountered, whether Arab, Turk, or Jew? How important were they to the overall result, and thus to the making of the modern Middle East?

France’s higher education system can seem arcane to outsiders, especially those from the English-speaking world. Although the Sorbonne is coeval with Oxford and Cambridge, there is far greater prestige in attending one of the Grandes Écoles such as Polytechnique or the École Normale Supérieure, only accessible by notoriously difficult entrance examinations. Perhaps even less familiar is the Collège de France, established by François Ier in the sixteenth century as a secular alternative to the Church-dominated Sorbonne; the Collège today is essentially a research university whose professors, elected by their peers, represent the élite of senior French academics.

Miranda: Oh brave new world, that has such people in it ...
Prospero: Tis new to thee ...

The Tempest

In July 1942 the Police Battalion 101 was ordered to murder all the older men, women, and children in Józefów, in Poland. Major Wilhelm Trapp, a member of the Nazi Party, led the battalion. He made an unprecedented offer. If any older members of the battalion felt unable to proceed, they could be excused. Twelve men withdrew from the atrocities that were to follow; the vast majority went on with the killing.

The Holocaust ushered in new technologies that made the kind of direct killing experienced at Józefów obsolete. Murder became mechanised. Yet the central questions raised by this incident remain: what motivates soldiers to perform mass slaughter? Why do soldiers in fact go ‘beyond the call of duty’? Why are atrocities such as Mỹ Lai and torture in places like Abu Ghraib so commonplace? Ethics under Fire: Challenges for the Australian army tries to answer some of these questions while suggesting ways forward in the rapidly changing landscape of warfare.

This edited collection is the result of a conference in 2016. It covers the contribution ethics can make to the military (Part One); issues of cultural difference when working with allied forces, and the difficulties of acting ethically outside of conventional military frameworks (Parts Two and Three). Part Four adds narrative depth through writings about NGOs working with the Australian army. In Parts Five and Six, writers focus on uses of technology and the internet. Finally, in Part Seven the authors engage with three case studies.

What draws together these diverse contributions, ranging from writing by philosophers to soldiers to humanitarian workers is one central question: How can an institution which is ‘in the business of killing people and destroying property’ behave ethically? Even when this behaviour, as is in the case with the ADF’s work in Rwanda and Somalia, is motivated by the desire to restore human dignity and alleviate suffering, the role of the military is innately ethically ambiguous.