A cynic once remarked that an editor needs two things: good grammar and a long memory. But we all know there’s a bit more to it than that. As we prepare to send the April issue to press – the four hundredth in the magazine’s second series – it occurs to me that an editor’s main function is to be a recogniser of expertise, discernment, literary flair – and, more importantly perhaps, courage even, for sometimes it’s needed in this caper.

Over the past forty years, ABR has had the good fortune to publish hundreds of writers and critics who have demonstrated these qualities in abundance and who have contributed enormously to the success and tenor of this magazine. Some of them have been contributing for years. Neal Blewett wrote for us in 1966, long before he went into federal politics. Geoffrey Blainey had a review in the very first issue of ABR (first series), back in 1961. For me, it has been a privilege to work with this loyal and discriminating cohort.

But a magazine’s responsibilities don’t end there. We have a duty to encourage the many young littérateurs who long to appear in publications of this kind. ABR’s cultivation of new literary talent is ongoing and multifarious. Through lectures, workshops, prompt commissions, we offer freelance work to bookish newcomers. And we back it up with decent payments (there are no unpaid probations here). ABR continues to deplore the exploitation of freelance reviewers. Unpaid and patronised, young writers will give up in frustration or despair.

To mark its birthday, ABR is pleased to announce that our base rate of payment for reviews has increased by ten per cent to $55 per 100 words. Since 2013 the base rate has trebled, at a time of shrinkage or stagnation elsewhere. Furthermore, we are intent on paying writers $75 per 100 words in future.

ABR’s many Patrons are responsible for this increase, along with rising subscription revenue and admirable support from government. All of our Patrons are listed on page 8. With their continuing support, we look forward to paying our writers even better and to diversifying our programs. Patrons have the satisfaction of advancing literary careers and contributing to the vitality of arts criticism in the country.

Help us to support Australian writers by making a donation or becoming a Patron. To do so, please visit our website or drop me a line on (03) 9699 8822 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

I hope you will enjoy the four hundredth issue.

Peter Rose

I signed away ten years of my life at high school. Three hundred or so teenagers did likewise around the country; from Sydney and Melbourne to the wind-rustle quiet of burnt umber townships. We had similar reasons – wanting to be heroes and leaders, chasing self-respect, escaping loose ends, following Simpson and his donkey.

After graduation we cut our hair to regulation length, checked off items on a list in a thick wad of mailed instructions. We packed our luggage, teenage surfeit shrunk to military limits. Stiff in two-piece suits and shiny new leathers, family members farewelled, we converged on Canberra.

Canberra from above, in the throes of summer: a slice of suburbia deserted amid the pivot of a tumbleweed dust bowl; kindling grass chequered with vacant car parks; dark green mountains at the edge of the plateau. It was almost deserted. The politicians had gone home; locals had fled to the coast. The bushfire season consumed the headlines at a newspaper stand by the luggage carousel.

Buses with tinted glass awaited us. In a strange quiet, cocooned by the thrumming air-conditioning, we endured an anxious trip along the highway. Halfway up a gradual rise overlooking dry scrubland dotted with brick whitewash, our convoy turned through insignia-crusted walls. Into a strange city we burrowed, among Brutalist buildings stacked on the concave hillside like a Brazilian favela. Strangers began shouting at us. I caught the eye of another passenger and we shared a moment of sangfroid. We had arrived at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

‘I think that in a time when everything seems to be the victim of the pursuit of the moment, to have a natural rhythm which is completely to the counter, is almost in-and-of-itself something of a statement.’

Jonathan Green

Moments began as medieval measures, the time it took for a sundial’s blade of shadow to shift – ninety seconds or so, depending on the season. A slice of sunlight. A moment now carries cultural as well as temporal weight. A slice of spotlight. Increasingly, we speak of our present as a moment, as if its minutes are sprung like an ontological mousetrap, primed to snap. As Sam Anderson writes in The New York Times: ‘No nexus of events is too large or heterogeneous – no geopolitical weather too swirlingly turbulent – to avoid being reduced to the shorthand of the moment.’

Lawyers, media organisations, human rights NGOs, and unions have been lining up recently to warn us of a serious threat facing civil liberties in Australia. It comes in the form of Malcolm Turnbull’s new national security laws, which, in the name of combating foreign influence, would criminalise anyone who simply ‘receives or obtains’ information deemed harmful to the national interest. Yet there, in the midst of this chorus of opposition, stood economist and public intellectual Clive Hamilton, with his Chinese-speaking collaborator Alex Joske, to tell us that to resist the threat of Chinese authoritarianism we would have become more authoritarian ourselves.

A notable contributor to 2017’s crop of ‘Chinese influence’ reportage, much of Hamilton’s new book will be familiar to readers of that genre. Yet in Silent Invasion: China’s influence in Australia, he has not missed the opportunity to turn things up a notch.

The loss of Australia’s ‘sovereignty’ has been a common, if slippery, talking point in the debate so far. Here, Hamilton cuts through the confusion: the ‘invasion’ in the book’s title is no mere flourish. The People’s Republic of China is laying the groundwork in order, one day, to make territorial claims on our nation. Failure to heed the author’s prescient warnings ‘would see Australia become a tribute state of the resurgent Middle Kingdom’. And just as Australia’s survival is on the line, so too is Hamilton’s. Realising the scale of the Chinese threat was something of a dark epiphany for him: ‘I felt nervous about my own future, given the reach and ruthlessness of China’s security apparatus.’

But what exactly have we lost, or stand to lose, to justify this sense of impending doom? Which of our freedoms has China’s influence so far threatened?

Readers of Silent Invasion will search in vain for evidence that Chinese actors have impaired the normal functioning of our imperfect democracy, let alone succeeded in imposing on us elements of the PRC’s totalitarian system. To be sure, Beijing has its lobbyists, its front groups, its propaganda; but to depict China’s activities as in any way unique in this respect strains credulity. US lobbyists admitted as much, when they complained that Turnbull’s new laws would endanger their own activities in Australia.

Hamilton is equally aware of this basic truth. Notwithstanding its catalogue of Chinese wrongdoings, Silent Invasion in fact carries a very simple message, one that renders much of the lengthy book superfluous: China presents a threat not because of what it does, but because of what it is.

In Hamiltonian ethics, the key question is not the nature of the deed, but the identity of the actor. Judging ourselves by the standards to which we hold authoritarian China would therefore be a false equivalence. This logic renders us immune to any charge of hypocrisy, and gives Hamilton a green light to sacrifice principle to thwart his enemies. ‘Are we so soft as to defend everyone’s right to free speech when their objective is to take away our free speech?’ In their submission to parliament, Hamilton and Joske outlined this position explicitly: to meet the Chinese threat we would have to abandon the idea of treating all sources of foreign influence equally. One might well ask, where would this leave the principle of equality before the law? In a very vulnerable position, it turns out.

It is common knowledge that the Chinese Communist Party is a secretive institution, which presides over a dictatorial regime at home, and adopts thuggish tactics to defend its interests abroad. That means putting pressure on Chinese citizens living in Australia – much of it directed towards democracy activists, or minority groups it views as inherently suspicious, such as the Uyghurs. Clearly, the party should be told to back off. Employers and universities need to know the pressure that people in their charge might be facing. Beyond that, there is an obvious remedy to this situation. If someone is being victimised here in Australia, there is a good chance they will face the same, or worse, back in China. Such individuals should have every opportunity to apply for refugee status.

Hamilton doesn’t say if he supports this approach or not, but he is clearly sceptical of the wisdom of embracing more citizens of the PRC on humanitarian grounds. We have been burnt that way once before, he believes. Bob Hawke’s intake of Chinese refugees in 1989, in the wake of the Tiananmen massacre, was a mistake: these were mostly ‘economic migrants’, some of whom have gone on to become ‘agents of influence in Beijing’s campaign to transform Australia into a tribute state’.

Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin among other world leaders at the Belt and Road international forum in Beijing, May 2017 (source: kremlin.ru, Wikimedia Commons)

Instead, the emphasis of Hamilton’s proposals is firmly on the punitive, to ostracise and restrict the rights of Chinese in Australia. Specifically, he wants to ban organisations which fall within the pastoral care remit of the Chinese embassy, such as the Chinese Students and Scholars Associations, and reject out of hand residency applications from anyone who participates in ‘patriotic agitation’ while studying here. By Hamilton’s broad definitions of pro-PRC activism, this would cast suspicion on anyone who has ever cheered for a visiting politician from Beijing or been snapped glad-handing the local PRC consul. If implemented, Hamilton’s residency blacklist would license a form of red-baiting far more intense than any Cold War snooping in Australia’s Chinatowns.

This is but a prelude to the more serious steps that Hamilton sees as necessary to confront China: we must restructure our economy to avoid dependence on the PRC, riding out any economic hit that this entails, and prepare for eventualities in the case of war. This will involve silencing dissent from a ‘fifth column’ of pro-China business élites and muddle-headed peaceniks, and quelling any civil strife that the CCP tries to instigate among Chinese locals. In the book’s conclusion, Hamilton speculates as to the percentage of Chinese in Australia whose primarily loyalties lie with Beijing.

Hamilton’s McCarthyist manifesto might be more easily dismissed if it were the case, as he insists, that his is the voice of an embattled minority. He rails against not only the ‘realists’ and ‘pragmatists’ but also the more insidious ‘appeasers’ and ‘capitulationists’, who combine to dominate our ‘media, think tanks, universities, businesses, business lobbies, the public service and, of course, parliaments’. But the truth is that bipartisan subservience to Washington is as solid as it ever was in Australia. And with Pacific Command top brass Harry Harris on his way here as Trump’s ambassador, Silent Invasion will serve as a resource for policing even the mildest criticism of the US alliance. In Hamilton’s view, the idea of a more ‘independent’ foreign policy is but a mirage, one that only serves the interests of Beijing.

In the absence of more Chinese Australian voices in this debate, Hamilton foists his black-and-white view onto the community. While claiming to have engaged widely, he gives voice only to those who meet his standard for a genuine Chinese-Australian – staunchly loyal to Australia, and defiantly hostile to the PRC. One of Hamilton’s close collaborators is John Hu, previously a Liberal Party councillor and now chairman of the Australian Values Alliance (AVA). The AVA espouses a love-it-or-leave-it brand of Australian patriotism, which, predictably enough, leads in the direction of apologies for Australian racism.

Hu seems to have impressed on Hamilton the notion that Chinese in Australia would all be dinky-di Aussie patriots like himself, were it not for the brainwashing they receive at a young age. ‘Brainwashed from birth’, these mainland Chinese give everyone else a bad name, and so if Chinese in Australia end up victims of a backlash, well, it’s China’s fault. Should the White majority come to resent the presence here of ‘a large group of citizens whose understanding of the world is shaped in Beijing and whose first loyalty lies with the PRC’, Beijing will be to blame for creating that perception. Widely publicised books about a Chinese ‘invasion’ of Australia will of course have nothing to do with it.

Chief among Hamilton’s complaints against these recently arrived PRC citizens is the threat they pose to our intellectual freedom, a case he builds around a handful of classroom incidents that a receptive media has already turned into something of a canon. Even if we treated all these episodes as the work of patriotic hot-heads, we would still only have evidence for the views of a miniscule percentage of the more than 100,000 PRC citizens studying in Australia. But is that fair? To take one of them, Chinese students at ANU took offence when their Anglophone lecturer told them, in a lecture slide written in Chinese as well as English, not to cheat. They took this a twofold slight: that (a) the Chinese in the class were most likely to cheat, and (b) their English was substandard. Surely not an unreasonable interpretation?

A newfound confidence among some Chinese in Australia to talk back to figures of authority might create the occasional headache for university administrators. But a threat to the vibrancy of Australian intellectual life? Hardly. Certainly nothing that could compare to the Fair Work Commission’s recent decision to allow Murdoch University to terminate its union-negotiated contract (EBA). In doing so, Murdoch deprived its staff of their only legally enforceable right to intellectual freedom. Endorsing the move, Minister of Education Simon Birmingham publicly called on the rest of Australia’s vice-chancellors to do the same. The party plotting to undermine intellectual freedom in Australia today is the Liberal Party of Australia, not the Communist Party of China.

No doubt, those Australian universities with a Confucius Institute would be well advised to keep it at arm’s length from the undergraduate curriculum, lest directives from Beijing interfere with teaching on Chinese culture and society. Similarly, think tanks that solicit corporate donations, such as UTS’s Australia–China Relations Institute, should face questions as to the independence of their research. But to blame entities such as these for eroding critical thinking on China is to mistake the symptoms for the disease – the long-term decline in Australian university funding. Not once in his three-hundred-page tome can Hamilton find space to criticise the direction of Australian higher education policy. Nor is there any mention of disastrous decisions such as that of ANU in 2016 to slash its Asian Studies faculty, a cut from which this once-leading centre of China research will have difficulty recovering. No, for Hamilton the reason for the decline of a critical perspective on China is that our universities have been intimidated or bought off, with scholars ‘policing themselves so as to stay on the right side of the CCP’s legion of watchers’.

This unwillingness to confront our own failings and shift the blame onto China runs throughout today’s Chinese influence scare and reflects a deep malaise in Australian society. We’re all too conscious of the corruption in the system, the amount of influence-peddling going on, and how little say this leaves us in the most important decisions. Yet we feign shock when the Chinese join in the game and seek a quid pro quo for themselves. Sam Dastyari was a fool to forward on his bills to the ALP’s Chinese donors, and all the more for spouting CCP historiography on the South China Sea. But when you survey the dismal scene of Australian politics, who could blame Huang Xiangmo for trying to get value for money?

Silent Invasion will no doubt be sold as the book that Beijing doesn’t want you to read, but in reality, its paranoid tone will be music to the ears of Party Secretary Xi Jinping. An anti-communist witch-hunt in the West will be just the thing to revive the revolutionary esprit de corps that Xi thinks is lacking among the PRC citizenry, particularly those who seek a more comfortable life abroad.

Even on its own terms, Hamilton’s plan of action will be counterproductive. Treating the marginal position of Chinese in Australia as a counter-intelligence challenge will only drive them into the waiting arms of the Chinese embassy. And less punitive measures to entice Chinese into an Australian ‘mainstream’ will fall flat, as long as that mainstream is defined by a set of myths about distinctive Australian ‘values’, which, to outsiders, look as flimsy as the hastily built island camps in which we warehouse asylum seekers.

Countering the PRC buy-up of Australia’s Chinese-language media with greater public funding is an idea worth considering. But if that new media simply translates into Chinese a narrative of the PRC as inherently subversive, and US global leadership as essentially benign, its intended audience will most likely switch off.

Chinese banks do now give out more foreign loans than anyone else. In part, China has risen to this position of leading lender because its loans come with fewer strings attached than the World Bank’s or IMF’s, but there is no denying that its debt-diplomacy gives Beijing leverage on the global stage. Yet at the same time, China’s lone naval outpost on the coast of Africa cannot compare to the almost eight hundred bases that the US military maintains around the world. If America’s meddling looks like ‘child’s play’ from Hamilton’s Australian standpoint, it’s only because the United States allows us to play the role of bully’s sidekick. Things look a little less rosy to the Chinese, who have seen American bombs rain down on five out of the PRC’s fourteen neighbours since its founding in 1949. In a rivalry between Beijing’s empire of debt, and Washington’s empire of drones, we should be doing all we can to avoid taking sides.

The tectonic political shifts that have aroused Clive Hamilton’s anxieties are real, and there is no avoiding the political questions that they raise. But to deal with them effectively, we need to find ways to formulate legitimate criticisms of China’s actions without adding to our all-too-rich library of Asian invasion fantasies.

There’s good reason to be wary of foreign money in Australian politics. But let’s shine the same spotlight that fell on Sam Dastyari onto all the back-room lobbying that’s going on. Let’s give our universities the funding they need to resist the many and varied threats that corporate and political interests pose to their integrity. And let’s show some consistency in our anti-imperialism in the Asia-Pacific. Only then might we stand a chance of convincing Chinese in Australia that our policy was grounded in principle, and not xenophobia.

It has already become a cliché: Kevin Rudd’s memoir, Not for the Faint-Hearted, is not for the faint-hearted. More than 600 densely packed pages long, it contains some 230,000 words and over 1,000 footnotes, but by the end of the volume Rudd is yet to be sworn in as the twenty-sixth prime minister of Australia. Yet the work was ‘intended to be a letter of encouragement’!

I have always believed that, at a personal level, anything is possible, that if I desire to be a particular someone or do a particular something, I can. All my desires have been realistic: no hankerings for time travel or reinvention as a theoretical physicist, although both have enormous appeal. My desires have been possibilities: working as a volunteer in Africa, joining a choir, mountaineering, falling helplessly in love, winning the Booker. The only impediments would be lack of ability, lack of application, and/or lack of courage – all of which, given enough time, could be overcome.

Time, once as abundant as air, is now suddenly in short supply. One day everything seemed possible, and the next, my life wasn’t exactly on its knees, but neither was it leaping with anticipation.

When did it happen that all the things I planned to do became the things I will never do? I will never climb a mountain, I will never win the Booker, I will never sleep alone in the outback under a big Australian sky; even the choir and the hot love affair have gone the way of all flesh. The list of things not done, so recently sparkling with possibility, had turned to sludge. Hard not to feel a failure. Harder still not to wallow in self-blame for so much unused life.

Then my spirits lifted.

The Belgian-born scholar Pierre Ryckmans, more widely known to the world by his adopted name of Simon Leys, was widely hailed in the Australian press at his death in 2014 as ‘one of the most distinguished public intellectuals’ of his adopted country, where he had lived and taught for many years – first in Canberra, later in Sydney – and where, after a titanic battle with the Belgian bureaucracy, he chose shortly before his death to become a naturalised citizen.

‘Public intellectual’ aptly describes one side of Ryckmans’s complex character, though it doesn’t quite tell the larger story. It befits the man who, near the time of Nixon’s and Whitlam’s earliest visits to China, famously alerted the Western world to the lesser known aspects of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and who dipped controversially from time to time into other areas of public debate. But in his courteous, reclusive, and faintly eccentric way, Ryckmans was also what might be called a private intellectual, quietly immersed in art and books and scholarly pursuits that he loved, regardless of their immediate relevance or appeal to a wider public. Pleasing Myself, the title that Frank Kermode gave to a late collection of his own critical essays, is a phrase that seems equally to capture the motive and spirit of many of Ryckmans’s writings.

The centenary of the Russian Revolution has just passed, leaving a rather eerie silence, as Vladimir Putin’s Russia decided not to hold any official commemoration. In the current climate of what has been called a ‘new Cold War’ with Russia, people in the West often forget that the Soviet Union and its communist regime ceased to exist in 1991. The Russia of our imagination is still a superpower – despite the fact that its GDP has shrunk to approximately the size of Spain’s, putting it just below Australia in global ranking. Putin is not Stalin, however; for him the Soviet past is a mixed bag, part of which he wants to keep and part not. The once sacred October Revolution seems to be on the throw-out list.

Western Russia scholars were wary of the centenary, too. The general tenor of their assessments was that the revolution was a failure because it led to Stalinism. While Eric Hobsbawm’s judgement in The Age of Extremes (1994) was that the Russian Revolution was the key event of the global twentieth century, historians in the centenary year were keen to downplay its significance. In this, as in many other issues during his distinguished career in Soviet studies, American historian Ronald Grigor Suny is not marching in step. He thought the revolution mattered in the 1960s, when, as a young radical Marxist, he entered the historical profession and became a Soviet specialist, and he thinks it matters now. His lively and erudite new book, comprising six historiographical essays focusing on the interpretation of the revolution and its aftermath, is eloquent testimony to this belief.

Calibre Essay Prize

The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its twelfth year, has played a major role in the resurgence of the literary essay. This year we received more than 200 original essays from thirteen countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose judged the Prize with novelist and essayist Andrea Goldsmith and NewSouth publisher Phillipa McGuinness. Their task was a long but stimulating one because of the quality of the thirty longlisted essays.

Lucas Grainger-Brown is the winner of the 2018 Calibre Essay Prize. His essay, entitled ‘We Three Hundred’, offers a candid and unsentimental account of life at the Australian Defence Force Academy as an idealistic cadet straight out of high school. Dr Grainger-Brown receives $5,000 from ABR.

Grainger-Brown, who first wrote for ABR in 2016, told Advances: ‘It is an incredible honour to win the Calibre Essay Prize. Many of its past winners changed the way I think and feel about fundamental things. I am delighted my words will be added to this important body of work. When I was ready to write my formative story, I knew I had to submit it to the Calibre Prize. Australian Book Review provides a fantastic national platform for the appreciation of Australian arts, ideas, and culture. I hope my essay is read as a constructive addition to the ongoing dialogue about who we are and where we are going.’

This year’s runner-up is ‘Once Again: Outside in the House of Art’ by novelist Kirsten Tranter. In this ekphrastic essay, Dr Tranter, who lives in California, returns to Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation ‘The Visitors’ and offers a subtle meditation on art, parenthood, and expatriation. Kirsten Tranter receives $2,500. We will publish her essay in May.

Black Inc. may have decided not to proceed with The Best Australian Essays (as with its poetry anthology), but Calibre will be back bigger than ever in 2019.

ABR gratefully acknowledges generous support from Mr Colin Golvan QC and the ABR Patrons.

Peter Temple (1946–2018)

Peter Temple, the first crime writer to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, died at his home in Ballarat on 8 March, aged seventy-one.

Temple, who was born in South Africa and emigrated to Australia in 1980, was the author of nine novels, including the Jack Irish series, later adapted for television. Truth, his last novel, won the Miles in 2010. Temple also won five Ned Kelly awards and the British Crime Writer’s Association’s Gold Dagger award. In a tribute to its author, Text Publishing described Temple as bringing ‘the soul of the poet to the demands of the crime novel’.

Porter Prize

Nicholas Wong became the first Asian writer to claim an ABR literary prize when he was named winner of the 2018 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Wong, who had travelled from Hong Kong to attend the Melbourne ceremony on 19 March, receives $5,000 for his poem ‘101, Taipei’. He told Advances, ‘I’m honoured to be the winner, especially with a poem whose subject matter may seem foreign.’

Tracey Slaughter was placed second with her poem ‘breather’; she receives $2,000. One-third of the entries in this year’s Porter Prize came from overseas – a measure of its international prestige and of greater awareness of ABR outside Australia.

We congratulate Nicholas Wong, the other shortlisted poets (Eileen Chong, Katherine Healy, and LK Holt), and our three judges: John Hawke, Bill Manhire, and Jen Webb.

A podcast of the Porter ceremony – including readings from all five shortlisted poets – is available on our website.

Films Galore

For reasons too Bollywood to relate, our Film and Television issue has been postponed to June, giving readers more time to vote in our online survey. Tell us your favourite film, director, and actor for a chance to win one of five great prizes, including a one-year Palace VIP card. You have until 21 May to vote.

Noah Glass is dead, his fully clothed body discovered floating face down in the swimming pool of his Sydney apartment block, early one morning. Born in Perth in 1946, father of two adult children, widower, Christian, art historian, and specialist in the painting of fifteenth-century artist Piero della Francesca, Noah has just returned from a trip to Palermo. There he celebrated his sixty-seventh birthday, experienced intimations of mortality, fell precipitately in love, and agreed, for the sake of the beloved, to commit a crime. Even before the funeral, the police are in touch with Noah’s son: a valuable work of art has been stolen and Noah is implicated in its disappearance.

John Curtin may be our most extensively documented prime minister. He is the subject of many biographies (including one by the author of the volume reviewed here) and countless chapters and articles, and is necessarily a central figure in war histories of the 1940s. John Edwards ventures into a well-populated field. The publisher’s claim in promoting the book that Curtin is one of our most underrated prime ministers is specious – in every comparative poll undertaken, Curtin is ranked at, or close to, the top.

In his earlier book (Curtin’s Gift, 2005), Edwards was explicit about his purpose in recovering Curtin from Labor partisans and war sacrifice narratives. There is no such declaration of purpose this time. He avoids framing his enterprise as a contribution to a larger debate, or explicitly engaging with differences in interpretation. His intention, evidently, is to tell the story anew, for the general reader, specifically focusing on wartime decision making. He makes judicious use of existing work when needed, but writes as if this is a tale never told before. It is an approach well-suited to the general reader. It may provoke peer researchers.

In Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering ancient Australia, Billy Griffiths describes the process of imagining the past through the traces and sediments of archaeology as ‘an act of wonder – a dilation of the commonplace – that challenges us to infer meaning from the cryptic residue of former worlds’. In his endeavour to infer meaning from this cryptic residue, Griffiths begins his wondering by sifting through the evidence, insights, enthusiasms, and mistakes of an articulate band of Cambridge-trained archaeologists who, from the 1960s, professionalised what had been the province of amateurs. Led by John Mulvaney, they halted the indiscriminate gathering of artefacts and human remains, brought rigorous techniques to the excavation of sites, and began to strip back the layers of time, aeon by aeon, to reveal the astonishing antiquity of human presence on the Australian continent.

By writing a history of the evolving discipline of Australian archaeology, Griffiths invites us to imagine a history of ancient Australia. The structure he has chosen serves his project well – to tell the stories of the significant players; the famous, the infamous, and the invisible; their personalities, methodologies, and discoveries – and, in so doing, to create a narrative that is accessible and compelling. It is a tale of the characters who dug the trenches, of the Indigenous people who objected to the cavalier approach of the early ‘cowboy’ archaeologists, of the political reverberations of archaeological finds within environmentally contested regions, of conflict and discovery and the shifting relations between white and Indigenous Australia.

I was never brave enough to visit Pompeii, partly due to an overactive imagination that combined a sense of the ferocity of Vesuvius’s blast in 79 CE and the volcano’s ongoing muttering with thoughts of the city’s Roman residents, cauterised in the eruption: outstretched hands; a dog expiring mid-roll; a mother and her child.

The shapes that people Pompeii are not strictly bodies. They are casts made by pouring plaster into the negative space left after skin and flesh and organs decomposed inside the ash and pyroclastic muck of the explosion. They are statues – constructions, rather than artefacts. I learned this while reading Ceridwen Dovey’s rich and ambitious new novel, In the Garden of the Fugitives. Pompeii anchors half of the book’s story through the character of Kitty Lushington, a vivacious archaeology student whose attention moves from the remnants of its dead world – casts and murals; all the rubble – to the ancient gardens of the place; the living, instead of the dead.

Flouting Christian principles

Dear Editor,
Paul Collins’s essay ‘God and Caesar in Australia: The Close Nexus between Government and Catholicism’ (ABR, March 2018) was a brilliant piece. What I found most interesting was the huge gap between the teachings of Jesus on human behaviour – compassion, tolerance, love, concern for others, empathy – and the apparent abandonment of such principles by the so-called Christian Right in our parliament. Its approach to the marriage equality issue and the bill led by the courageous Senator Dean Smith seemed to flout all Christian principles. The same situation appears to be so in the United States, How can such contradictory attitudes be deemed Christian?

John Miller, Toorak, Vic.

Trivialising the tale

Dear Editor,
Saul Bellow says somewhere that in fiction sentences should be ‘charged’ – something should quietly beat through them. When you begin reading, this is what you should listen for: imaginative confidence, a sense of sureness. This applies to historical fiction as much as any other. You don’t ask, ‘Is this true to history?’ You ask, ‘Is this true to itself?’ Luke Slattery’s Mrs M is imaginatively true from beginning to end.

Reading Gillian Dooley’s review of Mrs M, I felt as if it were an account of a different novel altogether (ABR, March 2018). Her criticisms are mostly of the pernickety kind, although she conflates them into a vaguely defined sense of disapproval. What I found astonishing was her reluctance to convey to your readers any of the novel’s finer qualities: its energy, its humour, its visual sensitivity, and the achievement of conveying, in a first-person narration, the interior life and adventures of an intelligent and spirited woman of the early nineteenth century. I felt, from the very first pages of Mrs M, a sense of authorial authority.

Dooley provides only two fragmentary quotes, out of context, and they are used – rather clumsily – to scorn the novel. I suspect that her decision not to quote any longer passages was part of a general reluctance to give the book its due. I should add that she never gives an adequate account of the story – the essential matter of the novel – which is the political drama that Macquarie provoked when he insisted that former convicts were the equal of free settlers and that the penal colony at Sydney Cove should become an elegant Georgian town. As a result, she not only diminishes the novel’s stylistic achievements, she trivialises the story itself. The novel deserved better.

Barry Oakley, Wentworth Falls, NSW

Thuggish methods

Dear Editor,
I will believe that the Chinese employ thuggish methods abroad when they have their Marines in Darwin, conduct exercises with our Navy, mandate our military purchases, and exclude Australians from listening posts at Pine Gap and the North West Cape. The rivalry between US and Chinese investors is commercial; only the PR has a different complexion.

David Fitzpatrick (online comment)

Tim Rowse

Dear Editor,
I’m surprised that Philip Jones was impressed by, and seemingly convinced of, the validity of Tim Rowse’s argument that institutionalisation ‘ensur[ed] the survival’ of Australia’s Indigenous population (ABR, March 2018). Isn’t this just another way of saying ‘at least European invaders didn’t massacre them all’? The reviewer also comments, with apparent disapproval, that ‘For some historians, an appreciation of the actual damage done to Aboriginal people by colonialism can cause bias to affect their work’. I would think that the most objective historians should be rightly concerned about ‘actual damage done to Aboriginal people by colonialism’, and that acknowledging that damage should not draw a charge of bias. I’m afraid I disagree with your reviewer. Rowse’s work sounds very much like an apologist interpretation of colonial policies, at least from this review of it.

Claire Rhoden (online comment)

Beowulf

Dear Editor,
Bruce Moore, in his review of the new edition of Beowulf, has offered a good review and a useful discussion of translation issues (ABR, March 2018). It would be interesting to know the extent of translator Stephen Mitchell’s knowledge of Old English. Given the wide linguistic range of his other translations (Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Chinese), one wonders how much he himself draws on the work of others, or whether he is one of those impressive intellects skilled in many languages. I agree with Bruce Moore that the Beowulf translations of Michael J. Alexander and Seamus Heaney stand out, but even better is Alexander’s Penguin Glossed Text of the poem where readers (with a fair amount of work) can find their way into the original – Old English text on the left hand page, glossary on the right. Sydney University taught me Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English in the 1960s. Happily, I see it is still teaching others the same.

Robert Wills (online comment)

‘Heroes, hero worship, and the heroic in history’: so did one observer describe the essence of Edmund Wilson’s To the Finland Station (1940). A series of portraits of ‘great men’, the book culminates with Lenin’s arrival on a German train at Petrograd’s Finland Station in April 1917, shortly after the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. In six months, Lenin – against all odds, by dint of sheer will – would overthrow the provisional government and establish the world’s first communist state.

Seventy-four years later, one of Lenin’s successors would dismember that state, almost inadvertently. ‘Heroic’ is not a word often applied to Mikhail Gorbachev, certainly not in Russia, where polls rank Putin, Lenin, Stalin, and even Brezhnev, who presided over the ‘era of stagnation’, far higher than Gorbachev. He is disliked by two-thirds of Russians and viewed favourably only by about one-fifth. When he ran for office five years after being booted out, he received a humiliating 0.5 per cent of the vote. Although Gorbachev, now eighty-seven, lives in Moscow, his daughter moved to Germany partly to escape the vilification still routinely heaped on the man who lost an empire.

Keith Waller was one of the top ambassadors in a period when Australia urgently needed them. During the Cold War, he served in Moscow and then Washington, where a skilled resident diplomat could be more important than a visiting prime minister.

As a young arts graduate, he had moved in 1936 from Melbourne to Canberra, where one of his first jobs was working for Billy Hughes, who had been prime minister in World War I. Occasionally, Waller must have felt that he was tending a beehive without mask or gloves.

When Waller made his first trip outside Australia at the age of twenty-seven, he was little prepared. It was less than three months before Pearl Harbor, and he had to open the first Australian embassy in Chonqing, the new wartime capital of China. Much of that nation had already been conquered by the Japanese, and Waller had to fly in from Burma – in effect the back door. Neatly dressed as always – his nickname was ‘Spats’ – Waller was persuaded by foreign diplomats to wear shorts and to appear a bit casual. It did not come easily. A Chinese photo shows him wearing a tie and reading a book while being carried in a chair along a narrow street by four strong men.

‘It is hard to reach the truth of these islands,’ observed Robert Louis Stevenson of Samoa in a letter written to a close friend in 1892, two years after the author had moved to an estate on Upolu. Stevenson, who died in 1894, could never have anticipated the prophetic dimension added to those words. Less than a century later, in the 1980s, the Western understanding of Samoan society would become the subject of a fierce and protracted international dispute among anthropologists and others that has raged ever since.

A cynic once said that the more bitter the dispute between academics the less there is at stake. But when in 1983, Derek Freeman, a New Zealand-born anthropologist based at the Australian National University, published a refutation of the fieldwork conducted in Samoa in the 1920s by his famous American colleague Margaret Mead, it wasn’t simply an intramural disagreement. Freeman seemed to call into question the most widely accepted assumption within the social sciences of what it is to be human.

The Boy from Baradine is one of the latest Australian political memoirs to hit the shelves. Craig Emerson, a prominent minister in the Rudd and Gillard governments between 2007 and 2013, has some interesting stories to tell about life as a political adviser, a pragmatic supporter of the environment, and an ambitious Labor politician. Emerson comes across as genuine and down to earth. He appears not to have carried a grudge towards those who at times obstructed his political career. Indeed, one of the saddest implications of the book is the sense that political ambition tends to make political and personal friendships difficult to maintain.

The most intense sections of the book concern Emerson’s formative years. While the author goes to great lengths to acknowledge the bond he had with his hard-working mother and father, it is clear that Emerson’s childhood was often traumatic. His honesty is admirable, but at times readers may feel they are intruding on what are essentially private matters. Furthermore, the searing quality of the early chapters contrasts rather sharply with the rest of the book, which adopts a lightness of tone and presents Emerson as a man of action, not of deep reflection.

‘A letter always seemed to me like immortality because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend,’ wrote Emily Dickinson. Yet part of the lure of letters – and life writing generally – is a sense of the corporeal, the promise of discovering the writer herself. As Jacqueline Rose suggests, writing about biography and Sylvia Plath in the London Review of Books, it is tempting to imagine access ‘not just into the inner recesses of the poet’s thought, but through the veils, behind the closed doors of her past’.

Perhaps suicide intensifies this desire. Rose suggests ‘it is a paradox of suicide that the murderer, who lives on for ever, is the one who didn’t survive’. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), she probes the antithetical after-effects of this. Plath ‘haunts our culture’, Rose writes, but is caught between execration and idealisation, hovering in ‘the space of what is most extreme, most violent, about appraisal, valuation, about moral and literary assessment’.

‘When I was younger even the appearance of “I” on the page made me feel a bit ill,’ Zadie Smith confesses in her new book of essays, Feel Free. Shades of this chariness about the personal pronoun still persist in her non-fiction today, which is markedly self-effacing. From the outset, Smith repeatedly attempts to ditch the mantle of authority: ‘I have no real qualifications to write as I do. Not a philosopher or sociologist, not a real professor of literature or film,’ she says in her foreword. Later, she demurs, ‘I am a laywoman … a dilettante novelist, a non-expert.’ You could be forgiven for writing off such claims as disingenuous, coming from a boldface name who writes for The New Yorker and Harper’s – hardly the bush league.

By the end of Feel Free, I came to see these caveats not as false modesty, but rather as Smith’s declaration that she won’t heed jurisdictional boundaries. Over the course of these essays, she moves balletically between highbrow and popular art, politics, identity, and philosophy. She examines the isolating fame suffered by pop’s preening boy-king Justin Bieber through the lens of philosopher Martin Buber’s theories of I-Thou and I-It. She uses Kierkegaard to illuminate her obsession with Joni Mitchell. She argues that the materialistic swagger of Jay-Z’s rap verses is linked to the long history of boasting in epic poetry: ‘asking why rappers always talk about their stuff is like asking why Milton is forever listing the attributes of heavenly armies’. In Smith’s hands, such long-bow connections between esoterica and mainstream culture seem natural – inspired, even. They’re also frequently very funny.

Elizabeth Hardwick is, unfairly, better known outside of New York as Robert Lowell’s second wife, who heroically endured twenty-three years of tumultuous and tortuous marriage. She inspired his finest love poetry:

So much has been written about male–female power dynamics, Trump’s grotesqueries, the public outing of protected abusers, and the growing chorus of women speaking out about sexual harassment that it’s hard to believe there could be anything new to add. Yet Rebecca Solnit, author of celebrated essays ‘Men Explain Things to Me’ and ‘If I Were a Man’, is skilled at filtering cultural commentary into thoughtfully argued and nuanced think-pieces; at combing through the clamorous voices to find the nub. Some of what Solnit writes is far from new, but her ability to see connections between seemingly unrelated events or ideas, while highlighting the pervasiveness of gender inequality and its deep entrenchment in many of our institutions, is what makes her work stand out from others.

Duumvirates frequently dominate politics, irrespective of whether they are partners or rivals: Napoleon and Talleyrand; Nixon and Kissinger; Mao and Deng. But few second bananas survive history’s vicissitudes. A dwindling portion of the Australian public might still recognise the names of Robert Menzies and John Curtin, but one doubts whether anyone outside the field of diplomacy still recalls Richard Casey.

James Prior mounts a serious case for a re-evaluation of Casey’s influence upon the profound reorientation of US foreign policy throughout 1940–42. Australian historiography has traditionally accorded Curtin primacy in the forging of the American alliance. However, Prior delivers convincing evidence of Casey’s untiring efforts to convince Washington of the centrality of Australia as a ‘bridgehead and a base’ of operations.

A Scandal in Bohemia: The life and death of Mollie Dean is Gideon Haigh’s engrossing account of the circumstances surrounding the unsolved 1930 murder in Elwood of primary school teacher, aspiring journalist, and bohemian, Mollie Dean. Less true crime journalism than an interrogation of the genre, Haigh’s meticulously researched book recalls the ‘thick description’ of cultural history, which in historian Greg Dening’s words conveys ‘the fullness of living’ at a particular time, in a particular place. In this instance, the time and place are Melbourne in the 1920s and 1930s and, more specifically, the ‘virtual Melbourne Bloomsbury’ (as it is described by biographer and memoirist Gary Kinnane) of the group of artists, writers, musicians, and intellectuals with whom Mollie Dean became entangled. This group included chief conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Fritz Hart, The Bulletin’s Mervyn Skipper and his wife, Lena, poets Louis Lavater and Frank Wilmot, writers Bernard Cronin and Vance and Nettie Palmer, and artists Max Meldrum, Clarice Beckett, Justus Jorgensen, and Colin Colahan among others.

The ancient Greek gods were a rowdy bunch. Adultery, theft, blackmail, and lies are all on the record, as are the usual confrontations between siblings, ranging from harmless banter all the way to aggravated assault – and worse. In short: rather than paragons of exemplary behaviour, Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and Aphrodite were quintessentially human. Like us, they loved, hated, and envied one another; like us, they felt intense affection, jealousy, and pride. The Greek gods and goddesses never aspired to lead by example. Rather, they outdid humans by getting away with murder.

Myth (ancient Greek mythos) is the body of stories that circulated in ancient Greece and Rome telling about these gods, their origins, genealogies, and relationships to one another and to the humans in the world. Despite the amusing (and often disturbing) content matter, the historical and cultural significance of myths cannot be overestimated. Not only do they provide a unique access to the world view of the ancient Greeks and Romans, they also constitute part of the classical legacy, inspiring art, literature, and film ever since.

‘We are the inheritors of a world we need to remake for ourselves.’
Rodney Hall, The Island in the Mind (1996)

Of the now twelve novels that make up Rodney Hall’s distinguished prose fiction – ranging from The Ship on the Coin (1972) to this year’s A Stolen Season – it is arguably in the latter that the task of remaking is most explicitly and adventurously undertaken, even literally in the case of Adam Griffiths. As an Australian soldier fighting with the ‘Coalition of the Willing’, Adam has been shockingly wounded: he is ‘helpless and isolated’. ‘Cocooned in his own silence’. Now, with his young wife, Bridget, who, in edge-of-panic reflection, muses ‘she ought never to have married him in the first place’, Adam, smashed, burnt, ‘ought to have died’, navigates the pain-racked hours, tortured step by step, with the robotic help of his exoskeleton, ‘the Contraption’. Like Viktor Frankenstein, Bridget recognises that she is in thrall to a monster: ‘He is her monstrosity, hers and hers alone.’

While Adam and Bridget struggle with visions of a terrifying future – ‘it isn’t just his life in ruins … So, of course, she’s angry’ – Marianna Gluck, into whose presence we are now unceremoniously conducted, is conscious, despite her jungle isolation, ‘that some day she will be forced to confront the past’. Having fled to ‘a country so remote she has never heard of it’ she feels safe. It’s not clear yet what she feels safe from, though the reader searching for continuity can find teasing shocks of recognition in Marianna’s self-knowledge that ‘she is the kind of monster who must learn step by step – and always painfully – how to behave in the age of humans’, and in her surroundings, the ‘baroque church tower’ she sees thrusting up nearby, reminiscent of that ‘mudbrick tower … spiralling up’ near the military compound where ‘a surprise explosion leaves two men dead and one, an Australian, critically injured’. The Australian is Adam Griffiths, and so we are briefly taken back to the incident that destroys his body and to the first sentence of the story. ‘A mudbrick tower stands in ancient Samarra …’

Adam and Bridget’s agony is interleaved – or, not to put too fine a point on it, interrupted – first by Marianna’s jungle escape and, perhaps most bizarre, confronting, and puzzling of all, the affairs of John Philip Hardingham, who, ‘too preoccupied with the meaninglessness of existence, too filled with doubts and regrets, too shy to make new friends and, in the end, too comfortable with his capitulation’, discovers at age sixty-eight that his parents’ conviction that ‘he would one day be someone special’ may be coming true. What will ensure his distinction is the ‘curious legacy’ from an eccentric, childless great-great-uncle and the manner in which John Philip chooses to celebrate it. To this celebration – out of place and unexpected among guests more notable, genteel, and effete – comes Christian Fletcher, better known to Adam, in another time and under fire on the Iraq front, as Killer.

Our dark hut with its shattered roof stands abandoned on the black land under the empty sky. Too early for moonrise. Soon a man won’t be able to see his fucking hand in front of his fucking nose. A single vehicle drones invisibly along the road that runs in a sandy depression. Now the Milky Way begins to emerge – a glittering universal lake seen upside down – as if you’ve been stood on your head. Thing is … to get a fix on east, the way to the river, and not lose it. Christian Fletcher takes the lead … Out across the infinite nowhere. Treacherous stones underfoot. The least noise a dead giveaway. ‘Halt,’ I whisper. ‘Ssh!’ We stop: Ratso, Killer, me. That lone vehicle drones, remote as an insect …

As happens so often in this novel, one narrative reactivates another: a character makes a surprising return, memories, chance encounters, sudden recalled words or sentences, long forgotten voices, the unlooked for suddenly logical lineaments of certain incidents – Adam’s unusual blood group, for example, and the mysterious emergency recipient of his ‘jar of blood’ bound for ‘the third world’ – these are the triggers and engines of a network of hints, signals, chords, and lightning-like illuminations that subtly stitch together the seemingly disparate stories – Marianna’s, John Philip’s – through which are woven the strands of Adam and Bridget’s profoundly moving, doomed bid for renewal.

This is a terrific, unremittingly demanding novel that comes after an uncharacteristic hiatus in Rodney Hall’s creative life – a fiction hiatus anyway – and it is not just tempting but necessary to note that Hall’s long-standing interest in the ways and possibilities of narrative has reached, in A Stolen Season, a daring, almost reckless, magnificent climax (eclipsing the massive narrative problem he successfully conjures with in, for example, the splendid The Day We Had Hitler Home, 2000).  A Stolen Season more or less abandons explanation and offers the kind of network of glimpses, echoes, apparent juxtapositions, voices, intriguing possible connections, and credulity-testing ironies that most of us encounter and shrug through year by year, sometimes seeing and making the connections, sometimes not.

All of this is accomplished in a prose equal to any test: the lush jungle and precipitous, mysterious heights of Marianna’s escape; the flash and blur, the mutilation of combat; the orotund ironies of John Philip’s nunc dimittis moment; Bridget’s confused guilt; and, like an always ready theme to swell into any pause or moment of indecision, the murderous pomposity of the ‘Coalition of the Willing’ and the duplicity of ‘weapons of mass destruction’.

In its scope and innovation, its flair and balanced intricacy, the sense it has of Hall’s successfully gathering together and, as it were, consulting a lifetime’s personal artistic provenance, A Stolen Season is outstanding and inimitable.

It is Adam who utters, in his disabled, halting way ‘from the recesses of sleep’ the phrase ‘a stolen season’, as if reading Bridget’s thoughts about their youthful, ill-advised marriage. Bridget is not sure what he means – ‘perhaps he is thinking of football’. He is not thinking of anything in particular at that moment, having just painfully awakened and having ‘survived the night’, but all of Hall’s characters in their far-flung distantly connected ways long for a ‘season’ of independence, renewal, love, or recognition of one kind or another. In Adam’s season, his ‘body dreams of walking free: the natural balance of an evolved hunter, able to leap and pounce. He has to think his way back to the present.’

This is an American book and no doubt primarily aimed at those interested in how American publishing works, and specifically at those interested in gaining employment there or upgrading their skills. In Australia it will be of limited use to those with similar ambitions and interests, because the Australian publishing industry is structured in a significantly different way. But it contains enough wisdom for aspiring Australian authors to be worth the price of admission.

Even after the impact of the cyber-world, American book publishing at the top end is sufficiently prosperous to be able to offer such attractive advances that the contributors to this symposium can talk airily of good books needing five to six drafts. By contrast, Australian bestseller lists are dominated by overseas authors; quite a few of these titles are acquired from overseas publishers or authors, and the local house has little creative input whatsoever. The majority of successful Australian authors are of course represented by agents; but most local publishers are much more alert to the possibilities of unagented talent than are their New York counterparts. Even American and Australian job descriptions are different; this book discusses editors acquiring and commissioning books and subsequently liaising with sales and marketing; but we tend to call such senior editors ‘publishers’.

Set in England during the Big Freeze of 1962–63 – the coldest winter in nearly 300 years – Robert Lukins’s first novel tells the story of Radford, who is sent to live at Goodwin Manor, ‘a place for boys who have been found by trouble’. The Manor is overseen by Teddy, a charismatic depressive, who resists pressure to establish a ‘philosophy’ of reform and instead determines ‘only to keep [the boys in his care] alive’.

I’d ask you to reappear from behind the wet blanket, Sun,
                   But the ozone has been eaten by refrigerants
                                     And we can’t take your glare. We are people
                                                       Of the skin cancers, tuned by solar flares.

So, whatever your good intentions towards the solar system,
                   The galaxy, however far back to the beginning your light
                                      Reaches, we remain tentative, so easily led by your
                                                         Coming and going, we are trapped in this metaxy.

Judith Bishop’s Interval appears just over a decade since the publication of her first book, also using a one-word title, Event (Salt, 2007). This gap seems far too long. Certainly, there have been two chapbooks in the intervening years – Alice Missing in Wonderland and Other Poems (2008), in the Wagtail series from Picaro Press, and Aftermarks (2012), in the Vagabond Rare Objects Series, – but no full-length collection. The impression is that Bishop works slowly and meticulously. Both Interval and Event are what some may call ‘slim volumes’, that is, in comparison to many.

It is also worth noting in this context that Bishop is, so far, the only poet to have won Australian Book Review’s Peter Porter Poetry Prize twice, in 2006 with the haunting ‘Still Life with Cockles and Shells’, which was published in Event, and in 2011 with ‘Openings’, a moving poem that now appears, with just one change to a stanza break, in Interval.

1.

‘My new persona helped me to make money,’ says the streamer,
but cruel and petty, unhoped for ideal like a hovercraft shimmers
behind a definition of a chair.
You tarnish the boulevards
with your shrapnel castanets and chucked heels
dancing under the exsanguinated sun, but insufficient,
burnt coat of meaning wages a lost covenant.

You hang out till the last minute then take what’s left.
At home’s the torquemada you thought mistakenly.
The Equality Issue opines to the crepe myrtle.
‘I need superficial to relax’
says the airborne Treasure, drinking up a storm,
as she modded the program again until no frond pecks.
On TV chiselled-by-Praxiteles turns his novel arms.
He was an ornament to the game a muse on the field.
He passed away surrounded by his fame.

ending on a line by John Burnside

No one on the boats, just cats – thin, furtive.
There’s the blown cry of terns and the wheedling
embarkations of crows, but you will not slip

the knot of your thoughts, what has brought you
to this harbour. Rain in the distance, the same
cold chant echoing in your steps, in the oars

and in the salt-encrusted timbers of the boats
pitching by the pier. The smell of diesel, rust,
bilge. A pelican hunkers down in the wind

near a tangle of broken nets, lines, seaweed,
an oily squalor of wash along the shore.
From the boathouse fishermen with voices

like spray looming through a blowhole,
their weather-knotted faces turning to leer at you.
One of them, stiff as old rope, dumps

a bucket of guts and fish heads on the boards
The cats come quickly, eyeing each other, hissing,
clearing the pylons of gulls. Below the pier,

a stingray’s slow, soothing undulations.
Now the cats slink away with the waste
and like a mass of flies your thoughts return –

blatant, insistent – back to when you’d walk
into cold spindrift, or on to the rocks from where
the whole rank harbour was visible, the boathouse

with its splintering boards, ruined paint, always
a man on the jetty peering into the water …
In the distance a sudden lance of sunlight reveals

the ambiguity of your coming and going;
how the stone’s throw of the past is still at your feet
and will not move, though now you walk away

from the pier. A sharp skreel – yacht-repair,
or the noise of returning gulls. Sand grains
blow as savagely as fish hooks against your legs.

A cat trails you, its pitiful cry mingling with
the stink of dreck and rotting weed … both of you
homing in on something – the urgency of elsewhere.

Judith Beveridge

Judith Beveridge’s new collection, Sun Music: New and selected poems, is forthcoming.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Traducing a prominent critic on the AustLit online discussion list in 1997 led to some literary-world taking of sides and, after a while, to writing for and then getting involved with Overland magazine. (I was editor from 2002 to 2007 and am pleased to be still involved, on the board.)

What was the first book you published?

A Pedagogy of Place: Outdoor education for a changing world, by Mike Brown and Brian Wattchow, which has been an excellent backlist seller for Monash University Publishing in the United States and Europe.

Do you edit the books you commission?

Why do you write?

I write to make sense of the world – or at least to ask better questions – and because words are powerful, transformative tools that can help bring into being a more just and life-giving world.

Despite the detailed excavatory art of the finest biographies, sometimes it takes the alchemical power of fiction to approximate the emotional geography of a single human and his or her milieu. Stephen Orr’s seventh novel, a compelling and at times distressing portrait of a twentieth-century Australian painter and his family, is one such book. Roland Griffin’s resemblance to that of Russell Drysdale is clear from early on, not only through Orr’s descriptions of the type of creator Griffin is – a painter of ‘small towns, deserted pubs ... it was all he knew’ – but also through the portrait of the artist’s troubled son (Drysdale’s only son suicided at the age of twenty-one). Drysdale’s family story obviously worked as a catalyst for Incredible Floridas but rather than chronicling that story itself, Orr employs his own creative divinations to construct a breathing and tactile fictional amalgam from its outlines and contours.

Winston Churchill once famously said of Russia: ‘It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’ The aphorism is still cited regularly today by analysts and commentators confused by the opaque Russian state. Regrettably, the sentences that followed have been largely consigned to history. Churchill continued: ‘But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.’

Shaun Walker, a long-time Moscow correspondent for the British press (most recently The Guardian), provides more clues to understanding modern Russia in his first book. An orchestrated campaign to manipulate history, identity, and memory, Walker argues, forms a central aspect of President Vladimir Putin’s nearly two-decade long reign in his expansive post-Soviet empire.

Sometime in 1970, an unidentified person – perhaps a disgruntled journalist or aggrieved interviewee – scrawled the words ‘Smash “Hip” Capitalism’ onto an office wall at Rolling Stone magazine. It was an incisive piece of graffiti. Rolling Stone had begun publishing in 1967, in San Francisco, at the epicentre of the counterculture, but it had already proved less than radical. As the revolutionary promises of the 1960s flamed out in violence and despair – the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, the Manson murders, the Kent State shootings – Rolling Stone’s publisher, Jann Wenner, granted himself a new executive parking spot for his Porsche, and accepted $200,000 from the record labels CBS and Elektra in order to keep his magazine’s finances flush. ‘Well, Jann was building a corporation,’ remarked one former writer, who was sacked in 1970, alongside the majority of Rolling Stone’s early staff. ‘Love it or leave it, right?’

To celebrate the fortieth birthday of Australian Book Review’s second series and indeed its 400th issue in April 2018, we are offering two prizes for subscribers – superb books from The Folio Society worth a total of more than $400.

This prize is open to any new or renewing subscribers worldwide who take up or renew a print or online subscription to ABR for two years or more.

First Prize:
Stasiland by Anna Funder (RRP $59.95)
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (RRP $84.95)
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (RRP $79.95)
Emily Dickinson: Selected poems (RRP $39.95)

Second Prize:
Cloudstreet by Tim Winton (RRP $79.95)
The Middle Parts of Fortune by Frederic Manning (RRP $69.95)

To enter, simply visit our Subscriptions page and renew or take up a new print or online subscription to ABR for two years or more to automatically go in the draw.

Terms and conditions
This promotion is open to participants from any country.
If you are one of the two winners, ABR will contact you to confirm your postal address and then pass this on to The Folio Society for delivery of the books.