Stan Grant’s comment on the prolonged booing of the Australian Rules football star Adam Goodes – featured in Daniel Gordon’s new documentary, The Australian Dream (produced by Grant himself) – has attracted much interest, including more than one million hits on one website:

We heard a sound that was very familiar to us. We heard a howl. We heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering, and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, ‘You’re not welcome.’

Perhaps it was coincidental, perhaps the crowds simply grew tired of jeering, perhaps it was the speech itself (delivered in October 2015 at the Ethics Centre). Whatever the reason, public sentiment began to turn after Grant’s speech. People wore Goodes’s guernsey number and waved signs and banners saying ‘We love you Goodesy’. Celebrities filmed messages of support.

Goodes, having become so broken and dispirited as to remove himself from football, returned to play the last few games of the 2015 season. The booing resumed. Unlike a Sydney teammate also entering retirement, Goodes chose not to be chaired from the ground.

Grant tells us that because of Goodes a new space has opened up, one that will loosen the chains of history so that we might ‘find belonging, find each other’. I’m not so sure.

Adam Goodes in a still from The Australian Dream (photograph via Madman)

Earlier in the documentary, Goodes says he doesn’t know much about what it means to be Indigenous. Oh, but he certainly does. He’s been insulted and rejected. He’s been ‘encouraged’ to lay low and become invisible in order to fit in. As for his critics, as Gilbert McAdam says, ‘What would they know?’

To be Indigenous is often to experience racism and sometimes something even more. You might call it a structural thing: the insistence on a certain power relationship between Australia and its Aboriginal people that is perhaps the defining characteristic of Australian identity. Some have attributed this insistence to an antipodean Occidentalism, even a settler–colonialist psychosis, the result of a continuing collective insecurity and subsequent need for fragments of the mother colony to be bound together by the threat of the Other. It’s an ailment as old as the nation itself, and one that apparently makes it so hard for Aboriginal people to be fully accepted in Australia? It might help explain the treatment of Goodes and the rejection of The Uluru Statement, which says, in part: ‘The dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness.’ 

Goodes says he didn’t know much Aboriginal culture and identity. The legacy of a history of oppression can mean that, for many individuals, Aboriginality is just ‘broken glass and stray dogs’. Both men say that it’s hard to know what to do when the ‘smart asses’ call you the names a racist society makes so easily available: boong and coon and nigger and darky and ape. There is the heft of vicious history behind all those terms.

What to do? Ignore them? But it won’t go away, and your children and family and friends remain targets. Stand up and call them out? To do that you need supporters or you end up as isolated as Goodes.

Ironically, Goodes tell us it was the Sydney Swans ‘Bloods’ culture that gave him a sense of identity and the aspiration to be the leader he became, both within his team and within Australian Rules football as a whole. When his academic application to Indigenous Studies made him realise the injustice and oppression of his history, he continued to lead. He called out racism and then spoke compassionately about the individual in question, explaining that it was not her choice as such but the result of a discourse in which she was immersed, one that maims us all.

The booing grew louder.

Stan Grant in a still from The Australian Dream (photograph via Madman)

Another response to racism is to fight. Many Aboriginal people’s life experience teaches them that an effective response to racism is violence. Flog the perpetrator. Nothing else will get it to stop. Goodes couldn’t do that, though his ‘war dance’ was perhaps symbolic of such an approach. In his case – one against thousands – it only exacerbated the problem. The howling mob rose against him, eager for any excuse for self-righteous offence, keen to put him in his place. But that dance also represented an attempt to draw upon his heritage for comfort, for healing, for a solution to the structural dimension of racism.

Goodes’s return to ancestral Country is clearly an attempt to draw upon his pre-colonial heritage for solace, if not a solution. It works, after a fashion. It helps him to return to football. I am not claiming the dance or the journey as substantial examples of connection with Indigenous heritage, but they do signal a new direction.

There’s plenty of evidence highlighting the potential for such reconnection to heal individuals and communities. There’s a growing realisation that such heritages are also important denominations in the currency of identity and belonging for all Australians. Look at the material used to express Australia’s imagery internationally. Look at the rise of dual naming, the increase in Welcomes to Country and the use of language therein. Look at the popularity of Indigenous tourism, films, and literature.

True, in many cases this heritage – in its classical sense – is frail and endangered. And true, in at least some cases, ‘mainstream Australia’ appears to desire heritage but not its custodians. It is the reconnection and recovery of such heritages by home communities, and their empowerment through controlled sharing of them, along with a readiness to challenge ossified certainties, that will provide a more nuanced sense of national identity and will close the door on the hysterical manifestation of national psychosis and Indigenous structural powerlessness that this compelling documentary reveals.

Not a howl – a Voice.

According to Angela Carter, who wrote perceptively on the subject, ‘the pleasantest, most evanescent kind of fame … is that during your own lifetime’. By the end of her life, Carter had cultivated her own celebrity: she was interviewed on television, adapted her own work for the BBC, and won several awards. Academia is often interested in celebrity when it is, like Carter’s, an adjunct to artistic talent; so much has been written on the celebrity of a Byron or Wilde, a Dickens or Colette. But people who are famous for less august enterprises, or famous for being famous, are often overlooked or dismissed altogether. Celebrity, apparently, cannot be a talent in itself.

Sharon Marcus’s The Drama of Celebrity begs to differ. Celebrity can confer on artists a certain ‘superiority to conventional canons of conduct’ and therefore the freedom ‘to indulge the personal idiosyncrasies that bestow … on each star an aura of uniqueness’. She leans heavily on Erving Goffman – who argued, among other things, that society succeeds by placing checks on individual egotism – and contends that from the nineteenth century onwards celebrities have had an important function in our society as role models, expressing their individuality on a grand scale and so railing against mass conformity. Celebrity in itself, this would suggest, can have enduring cultural and artistic value.

Marcus’s main case study is the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), who is so prominent in the work that it sometimes reads like her biography. Bernhardt’s brilliance blazes throughout: she was hyperbolically described in her day as ‘an Alexander in petticoats’ and ‘A New Joan of Arc’. Henry James wrote that she was ‘poised upon … the ruins of a hundred British prejudices and proprieties’. She could count James, Wilde, Proust, and Freud among her admirers, Shaw and Chekhov among her detractors. She had a talent ‘Dionysian in its physical intensity’, as one critic put it, and her wisecracks might have left Mae West tongue-tied.

Life and times memoirs are often lives leavened with some tangential nods to times. In Iola Mathews’s book Winning for Women: A personal story, a notable career is inextricably linked with the remarkable times she did much to shape.

It is the story of a feminist, the Australian feminist movement, and the battle for transformational political, legal, workplace, and community changes driven by her and many other committed women. The book combines detailed socioeconomic analysis: generous credit to other workers in the field; insider insights into political and workplace change; frank and touching family and personal experiences – all underpinned by Mathew’s capacity to communicate complex issues with clarity and narrative force. It also includes a detailed agenda for policies to achieve greater gender equality in the home and at work now and in the future.

Mathews starts the story in the 1960s with the admission that back then reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex partly ‘defeated’ her; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique ‘passed her by’; and The Female Eunuch put her off by ‘its angry-in-your-face tone’. Thirty years later, she was on the same Dublin conference program as Friedan and the inimitable Bella Abzug.

Individuals have crises; dealing with them sometimes makes a person stronger. Perhaps nation-states are similar: crises make them stronger and better. But is humanity as a whole like this? This question is raised but not answered in Jared Diamond’s Upheaval.

Diamond sees four crises facing humans: the possibility of nuclear war killing millions and bringing ‘nuclear winter’; climate change; the depletion of essential natural resources; and global inequalities of living standards. He points to ways in which the latter three problems are related. As consumption by ‘have-nots’ approaches that of the ‘haves’ (a scenario that the ideology of global development promotes, especially in India and China), the depletion of the world’s resources accelerates. ‘Each year the average American consumes about 32 times more gasoline, and produces 32 times more plastic waste and carbon dioxide, than does the average citizen of a poor country.’ Were the world’s poor to live at US rates of resource use, waste, and CO₂ production, Diamond calculates that world consumption would be eleven times greater than now – as if the world population were eighty billion, an insupportable number.

It is a crisis of humanity’s self-belief that the promise of ‘global development’, construed this way, is ‘a cruel hoax’. Diamond writes that humanity could act collectively to ensure that national average rates of consumption converge towards a sustainable global average; this would be higher than the current consumption of the have-nots and lower than what we in the First World (about a billion of the seven and a half billion humans now alive) currently enjoy.

Announcing the 2009 ABR Favourite Australian Novel

When we sought readers’ nominations for the ABR Favourite Australian Novel (any era, any genre), we anticipated goodly interest because ABR readers are a passionate and well-read bunch. Still, we hadn’t anticipated the flood of emails and letters and faxes that followed.

By December 15, 2009, readers had voted in their thousands for some 290 individual novels. Actually, many more publications were nominated, but these included short story collections and autobiographies and overseas publications, all of which were ineligible.

Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, a perennial favourite since its publication in 1991, was the overwhelming favourite – by a margin of three to one to its nearest rival, Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which was closely followed by Patrick White’s Voss and Winton’s most recent novel, Breath.

Particularly heartening was the large number of nineteenth-century novels and those published before the remarkable expansion of fiction publishing in the last quarter of the twentieth century.

The following feature, which appears in ABR's February 2010 issue, lists the top twenty novels as selected by ABR readers.

 

 READ THE ABR FAN POLL FEATURE

 

Below we list all 290 nominated titles, purely in alphabetical order. Has anyone read all of them, we wonder.

A

Glenda Adams: Dancing on Coral (1987)

Raymond Aitchison: Contillo: A Novel (1966)

Steven Amsterdam: Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009)

Jessica Anderson: Tirra Lirra by the River (1978)

Thea Astley: Reaching Tin River (1990)

Thea Astley: Vanishing Points (1992)

B

Murray Bail: Eucalyptus: A Novel (1998)

Murray Bail: Holden’s Performance (1987)

Robert G. Barrett: And De Fun Don’t Done (1993)

Robert G. Barrett: The Godson (1989)

Max Barry: Jennifer Government (2003)

John Birmingham: He Died with a Felafel in his Hand (1994)

John Birmingham: Weapons of Choice (2004)

Jesse Blackadder: After the Party (2005)

Rolf Boldrewood: Robbery under Arms: A Story of Life and Adventure in the Bush and in the Goldfields of Australia (1888)

Martin Boyd: A Difficult Young Man (1955)

Martin Boyd: Lucinda Brayford (1946)

James Bradley: The Deep Field (1999)

David Brooks: Fern Tattoo (1996)

David Brooks: The House of Balthus (1995)

Geraldine Brooks: March: A Novel (2005)

Geraldine Brooks: People of the Book (2008)

Geraldine Brooks: Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001)

C

Anna Campbell: Untouched (2007)

Ada Cambridge: A Marked Man: Some Episodes in His Life (1890)

Fiona Capp: Musk & Byrne (2008)

Gabrielle Carey and Kathy Lette: Puberty Blues (1979)

Peter Carey: Bliss (1981)

Peter Carey: Illywhacker (1985)

Peter Carey: Oscar and Lucinda (1988)

Peter Carey: The Tax Inspector (1991)

Peter Carey: Theft: A Love Story (2006)

Peter Carey: True History of the Kelly Gang (2000)

Patricia Carlon: The Whispering Wall (1969)

Isobelle Carmody: Obernewtyn (1987)

Steven Carroll: The Art of the Engine Driver (2001)

Steven Carroll: The Lost Life: A Novel (2009)

Steven Carroll: The Time We Have Taken (2007)

Brian Castro: The Garden Book (2005)

Brian Caswell: A Cage of Butterflies (1992)

Nick Cave: And the Ass saw the Angel (1989)

Nan Chauncy: Tangara (1960)

Marcus Clarke: For the Term of His Natural Life (1874)

Jon Cleary: The Sundowners (1952)

Jon Cleary: You Can’t See Around Corners (1947)

Kate Cole-Adams: Walking to the Moon (2008)

Matthew Condon: The Trout Opera (2007)

Peter Corris: Salt and Blood (2002)

Kenneth Cook: Wake in Fright (1961)

Bryce Courtenay: Brother Fish (2004)

Bryce Courtenay: Jessica (1998)

Bryce Courtenay: The Persimmon Tree (2007)

Bryce Courtenay: The Potato Factory (1995)

Bryce Courtenay: The Power of One (1989)

Bryce Courtenay: Sylvia (2006)

Erle Cox: Out of the Silence (1925)

Alison Croggon: The Gift (2003)

Dymphna Cusack: Come in Spinner (1951)

D

Eric Dando: Snail (1996)

Eleanor Dark: The Little Company (1945)

Eleanor Dark: Prelude to Christopher (1934)

Eleanor Dark: The Timeless Land (1941)

Eleanor Dark: Waterways (1938)

Robert Dessaix: Night Letters (1996)

Joy Dettman: Henry’s Daughter (1938)

Joy Dettman: Mallawindy (1998)

Sara Douglass: Darkwitch Rising (Book 3 of the Troy Game Series) (2005)

Jon Doust: Boy on a Wire (2009)

Robert Drewe: The Drowner (1997)

Robert Drewe: Our Sunshine (1991)

Lyn Duclos: Shattered Reflections (2006)

E

Nick Earls: 48 Shades of Brown (2007)

Nick Earls: Zigzag Street (1996)

Greg Egan: Permutation City (1994)

Greg Egan: Quarantine (1992)

Sumner Locke Elliott: Eden’s Lost (1969)

Ben Elton: Blind Faith (2008)

F

Delia Falconer: The Service of Clouds (1997)

Richard Flanagan: Death of a River Guide (1994)

Richard Flanagan: The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997)

Richard Flanagan: Gould’s Book of Fish (2001)

Richard Flanagan: The Unknown Terrorist (2006)

Richard Flanagan: Wanting (2008)

David Foster: Dog Rock (1985)

Thurley Fowler: The Green Wind (1986)

Kathryn Fox : Malicious Intent (2004)

Karen Foxlee: The Anatomy of Wings (2007)

Miles Franklin: All that Swagger (1936)

Miles Franklin: My Brilliant Career (1901)

Joseph Furphy: Such is Life (1903)

G

Doris Pilkington Garimara: Rabbit Proof Fence (1996)

Helen Garner: The Children’s Bach (1984)

Helen Garner: Monkey Grip (1997)

Helen Garner: The Spare Room (2008)

Margaret Geddes: Unseemingly Longing (1997)

Nikki Gemmell: The Book of Rapture (2009)

Nikki Gemmell: The Bride Stripped Bare (2003)

Nikki Gemmell: Cleave (1998)

Nikki Gemmell: Shiver (1997)

May Gibbs: Snugglepot and Cuddlepie (1918)

Libby Gleeson: Eleanor, Elizabeth (1984)

Morris Gleitzmann: Two Weeks with the Queen (1990)

Andrea Goldsmith: Reunion (2009)

Peter Goldsworthy: Maestro (1989)

Peter Goldsworthy: Three Dog Night (2003)

Kerry Greenwood: The Castlemaine Murders (2004)

Kate Grenville: Dark Places (1994)

Kate Grenville: The Idea of Perfection (1999)

Kate Grenville: Joan Makes History (1988)

Kate Grenville: The Lieutenant (2008)

Kate Grenville: Lillian’s Story (1985)

Kate Grenville: The Secret River (2005)

Jeannie Gunn: We of the Never Never (1908)

H

Julia Haisley: The Good Samaritan (2008)

Rodney Hall: Captivity Captive (1989)

Marion Halligan: The Fog Garden (2001)

Rosalie Ham: The Dressmaker (2000)

Henry Handel Richardson: The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (1930)

Barbara Hanrahan: The Scent of Eucalyptus (1973)

Richard Harland: Worldshaker (2009)

Elizabeth Harrower: The Long Prospect (1958)

Sonya Hartnett: Of a Boy (2002)

Sonya Hartnett: The Ghost’s Child (2007)

Sonya Hartnett: Surrender (2005)

Sonya Hartnett: Thursday’s Child (2000)

Corrie Hasking: Eating Lolly (2008)

Vicki Hastrich: The Great Arch (2008)

Shirley Hazzard: The Transit of Venus (1980)

Xavier Herbert: Capricornia (1938)

Xavier Herbert: Poor Fellow My Country (1975)

Matt Howard: Street Furniture (2004)

Andrew Hutchinson: Rohypnol (2007)

Adrian Hyland: Diamond Dove (2006)

M.J. Hyland: Carry Me Down (2006)

 

I

David Ireland: The Glass Canoe (1976)

David Ireland: The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971)

J

Kate Jennings: Snake (1996)

George Johnston: My Brother Jack (1964)

Elizabeth Jolley: Foxybaby (1985)

Elizabeth Jolley: The Newspaper of Claremont Street (1981)

Elizabeth Jolley: The Well (1986)

Gail Jones: Dreams of Speaking (2006)

Gail Jones: Sorry (2007)

K

Tom Keneally: The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1972)

Tom Keneally: Confederates (1979)

Tom Keneally: A Dutiful Daughter (1971)

Tom Keneally: The Playmaker (1987)

Tom Keneally: Schindler’s Ark (1982)

Cate Kennedy: The World Beneath (2009)

Malcolm Knox: A Private Man (2004)

Peter Kocan: The Treatment (1980)

Peter Kocan: The Cure (1983)

Christopher Koch: The Doubleman (1985)

Christopher Koch: Highways to a War (1995)

Christopher Koch: The Year of Living Dangerously (1978)

Michelle de Kretser: The Lost Dog (2007)

L

Stephen Lacey: Sandstone (2005)

Margo Lanagan: Tender Morsels (2008)

Eve Langley: The Pea Pickers (1942)

Glenda Larke: The Last Stormlord (2009)

Tobsha Learner: The Witch of Cologne (2004)

Julia Leigh: The Hunter (1999)

Hilarie Lindsay: The Washerwoman’s Dream (2002)

Joan Lindsay: Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967)

Norman Lindsay: The Magic Pudding (1918)

Amanda Lohrey: The Reading Group (1988)

Joan London: Gilgamesh (2001)

Joan London: The Good Parents (2008)

Lennie Lower: Here’s Luck (1929)

M

Colleen McCullough: Morgans Run (2000)

Colleen McCullough: On, Off (2006)

Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds (1977)

Fleur McDonald: Red Dust (2009)

Roger McDonald: Mr Darwin’s Shooter (1998)

Andrew McGahan: 1988 (1995)

Andrew McGahan: Praise (1992)

Andrew McGahan: The White Earth (2004)

Rhyll McMaster: Feather Man (2007)

Wayne Macauley: Blueprints for a Barbed Wire Canoe (2004)

Shane Maloney: The Brush Off (1996)

David Malouf: An Imaginary Life (1978)

David Malouf: Fly Away Peter (1982)

David Malouf: Johnno (1975)

David Malouf: Ransom (2009)

David Malouf: Remembering Babylon (1993)

David Malouf: The Great World (1990)

Melina Marchetta: Looking for Alibrandi (1990)

Melina Marchetta: On The Jellicoe Road (2006)

John Marsden: Checkers (1996)

John Marsden: Tomorrow, When the War Began (1993)

Tony Martin: Lollyscramble (2005)

Sophie Masson: In Hollow Lands (2004)

Michael Meehan: The Salt of Broken Tears (1999)

Alex Miller: Conditions of Faith (2000)

Alex Miller: Journey to the Stone Country (2002)

Alex Miller: Landscape of Farewell (2007)

Alex Miller: Lovesong (2009)

Alex Miller: Prochownik’s Dream (2005)

Elyne Mitchell: Silver Brumbies of the South (1965)

Frank Moorhouse: Forty Seventeen (1988)

Frank Moorhouse: Grand Days (1993)

Sally Morgan: My Place (1987)

Jaclyn Moriarty: Finding Cassie Crazy (2003)

Kate Morton: The Shifting Fog (2006)

Tara Moss: Fetish (1999)

Gerald Murnane: Tamarisk Row (1974)

N

D’Arcy Niland: The Shiralee (1955)

Garth Nix: Lirael (2001)

Judy Nunn: Kal (1996)

O

John O’Grady (n.d.p Nino Culotta): They’re a Weird Mob (1957)

Bernard O’Reilly: The Green Mountains (1942)

P

Vance Palmer: The Passage (1930)

Ruth Park: The Harp in the South (1948)

Ruth Park: Playing Beatie Bow (1980)

Bronwyn Parry: As Darkness Falls (2008)

Bronwyn Parry: Dark Country (2009)

Elliot Perlman: Seven Types of Ambiguity (2003)

D.B.C. Pierre: Vernon God Little (2003)

Rosa Praed: Lady Bridget of the Never-Never Land (1915)

Katharine Susannah Prichard: Coonardoo (1929)

R

Leigh Redhead: Cherry Pie (2007)

Graham Reilly: Saigon Tea (2002)

Matthew Reilly: Five Greatest Warriors (2009)

Matthew Reilly: Ice Station (1998)

Matthew Reilly: Seven Ancient Wonders (2005)

Gregory David Roberts: Shantaram (2003)

Emily Rodda: The Forests of Silence (2000)

Jennifer Rowe: Stranglehold (1993)

Steele Rudd: On Our Selection (1899)

S

Sue Saliba: Something in the World Called Love (2008)

Eva Sallis: Fire Fire (2004)

John Scott: What I have Written (1994)

Craig Silvey: Jasper Jones (2009)

Neville Shute: On The Beach (1957)

Ivan Southall: Matt and Jo (1973)

Christina Stead: For Love Alone (1945)

Christina Stead: The Man Who Loved Children (1940)

Elizabeth Stead: The Fishcastle (2000)

Randolph Stow: To the Islands (1958)

Randolph Stow: The Merry-Go-Round in the Sea (1965)

Gunter O. Swoboda: Mountains of the Sea (2009)

T

Susan Temby: The Bread with Seven Crusts (2002)

Peter Temple: The Broken Shore (2005)

Peter Temple: In the Evil Day (2002)

Peter Temple: Truth (2009)

Peter Temple: White Dog (2003)

Kylie Tennant: The Honey Flow (1956)

Colin Thiele: Storm Boy (1963)

Glen Tomasetti: Thoroughly Decent People (1976)

Steve Toltz: A Fraction of the Whole (2008)

P.L. Travers: Mary Poppins (1934)

Rachael Treasure: Jillaroo (2002)

Rachael Treasure: The Rouseabout (2008)

Christos Tsiolkas: Dead Europe (2005)

Christos Tsiolkas: Loaded (1995)

Christos Tsiolkas: The Slap (2008)

Ethel Turner: Seven Little Australians (1894)

George Turner: The Sea and Summer (1987)

Janette Turner Hospital: Borderline (1985)

Janette Turner Hospital: The Last Magician (1992)

Janette Turner Hospital: Due Preparations for the Plague (2003)

W

Tasma Walton: Heartless (2009)

Jillian Watkinson: The Architect (2000)

Patrick White: The Aunt’s Story (1948)

Patrick White: The Eye of the Storm (1973)

Patrick White: A Fringe of Leaves (1976)

Patrick White: Tree of Man (1955)

Patrick White: The Twyborn Affair (1979)

Patrick White: Riders in the Chariot (1961)

Patrick White: The Solid Mandala (1986)

Patrick White: The Vivisector (1970)

Patrick White: Voss (1957)

Tim Winton: Blueback (1997)

Tim Winton: Breath (2008)

Tim Winton: Cloudstreet (1991)

Tim Winton: Dirt Music (2001)

Tim Winton: The Riders (1994)

Tim Winton: Shallows (1984)

Amy Witting: I for Isobel (1989)

Chris Womersley: The Low Road (2007)

Charlotte Wood: The Submerged Cathedral (2004)

Alexis Wright: Carpentaria (2006)

Patricia Wrightson: Down to Earth (1965)

Y

Peter Yeldham: Barbed Wire and Roses (2008)

Peter Yeldham: The Currency Lads (1998)

Z

Arnold Zable: Café Scheherazade (2001)

Matt Zurbo: Idiot Pride (1997)

Markus Zusak: The Book Thief (2006)

Markus Zusak: The Messenger (2005)

 

 

‘Serenity now,’ repeated Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza whenever his blood pressure got too high. His doctor recommended this anger-management technique, but he might as well have got it from Seneca, whose De Ira (Of Anger) James Romm has edited, translated, and released as How To Keep Your Cool. Seneca’s credentials are mixed: as a senator, he probably saw a fair bit of Caligula’s anger; as an exile, he had plenty of time for introspection; as a tutor, he saw his student Nero committ matricide. As Lloyd Braun said, ‘Serenity now; insanity later.’

To be fair, Seneca’s advice is more nuanced than repeating mantras. He acknowledges that we have involuntary reactions, but he stresses that emotions usurp our judgement only if we let them. As Romm translates: ‘just as bodies in freefall have no power over themselves and cannot resist or slow their descent … so the mind, if it launches itself into anger, or love, or the other emotions, has no chance to check its impetus’. Emotions are, by definition, irrational; you cannot have a moderate emotion any more than you can have moderate insanity. Reject them as soon as they appear: stay cool.

A public man, Seneca was aware that some situations demand a response. Should one do nothing if he sees his father killed or his mother raped? Seneca replies that the good man will avenge his parents because it’s his duty, not because he’s aggrieved (quia oportet, non quia dolet). This is shocking but not novel: Seneca was working within the Stoic tradition, which states that the ideal man has no emotions. Fortunately, he knows we can’t purge emotions. We can, however, prevent them from controlling us.

When we readily judge that someone has wronged us, anger is the result. Avoid this judgement by thinking of the times you’ve done something wrong. Don’t believe everything you hear. Don’t ask too many questions. Don’t live in luxury: ‘the mind must be roughly treated so that it does not feel any blows except the heavy ones’. The best cure for anger is delay (mora): would you hastily condemn a friend? So far, so good – but then Seneca encourages a disturbing lenience:

[the man who wronged you] was ordered to do it: who but an unfair man becomes angry at what’s necessary? He had been hurt: it’s no injury if you suffer what you did to him first. He’s a judge: you would do better to trust his opinion than your own. He’s a king: if you’re guilty and he punishes you, yield to justice; if you’re innocent, yield to your fate.

Glitter canons erupted at colourful gatherings across the country on 15 November 2017 as the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed that 61.6 per cent of participants had voted yes in the marriage equality plebiscite. Yes Yes Yes: Australia’s journey to marriage equality, published on the anniversary of that historic day, illuminates the official campaign’s manoeuvres.

Drawing on the recollections of two of Australian Marriage Equality’s most prominent spokespeople – independent NSW politician Alex Greenwich and Shirleene Robinson, an associate professor at Macquarie University – Yes Yes Yes commences in Canberra on 7 December 2017 when the legislation was finally passed in the federal parliament. Oddly, it offers few personal insights into the jubilation of the day. This approach is maintained as the book proceeds with a fairly straightforward timeline of events.

Because the settlement of Australia by the British proceeded in a certain way, we tend to forget how unusual it was in 1788 to start a colony without slavery. The year 1788 saw the first major manifestation of the abolitionist movement, which had a massive success by 1807 when the Atlantic slave trade was abolished. But slavery was central to the British Empire in 1788, one in which there had not yet been a ‘turn to the east’ towards India, and in which the sugar colonies of the West Indies were rich and important. The small number of convicts disembarking in Botany Bay in 1788 were vastly outnumbered that year by the tens of thousands of Africans taken to the Caribbean to labour in miserable slavery. Africa was a crucial part of the British Empire – far more important, of course, than a nascent Australia.

At its best, political science research is empirical, systematic, comparative, and provides cogent and durable explanations – not just descriptions – of political behaviour wherever it is observed. What a pity then that the Handbook of Political Party Funding, for all its strengths in these areas, also exemplifies one of the pathologies of contemporary academic research and publishing. With its self-referential concerns and methods, its jargon, and its forbidding price, this book is largely inaccessible to anyone outside the circle of professional researchers.

H.G. Wells, in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934), describes Henry James as ‘a strange unnatural human being’ who ‘regarded his fellow creatures with a face of distress and a remote effort at intercourse, like some victim of enchantment placed in the centre of an immense bladder’. Literary friendship and acquaintanceship, including the ways in which writer-colleagues portray one another in their autobiographies, is a key theme in Jerome Boyd Maunsell’s study of modernist novelists and autobiography. The author of an absorbing and incisive short biography of Susan Sontag (2014), Maunsell is himself an accomplished life writer.

Even in these golden years for Australian comics, Tommi Parrish stands out for their insight and talent. Their work takes weighty topics like gender, work, and friends and examines them through focusing on individual experiences, interior moments. It’s all brief grabs of sensations and ideas, which depends on good ambiguity management. Parrish’s vignettes feel fraught and intimate, but when the situations are usually so ordinary it can be hard to work out why. You come away feeling that strangeness and seriousness might be key features of everyday life.

The Lie and How We Told It is the artist’s first long work (a book of short pieces, Perfect Hair, was published by 2dcloud in 2016). It follows two young people who knew each other in school and meet again in a city years later. We don’t know much about them, and what we learn is not through exposition but through direct speech. We don’t know why ‘that guy’ Cleary dated was so awful back then, just that it’s something she’s discussing here. It all has the feeling of a conversation you’d overhear from people walking, talking, and drinking wine. You don’t understand too much of the subject matter, but you can pick up quite a lot about how they feel. 

Round, expressive figures are placed against watercolour scenes, filled with careful detail and saturated with mood. In a curious move, the main story is interleaved with pages from a found text with a different tenor. The lines are black and white, stark and rigid, with whole-page images intercut with narration from the point of view of a person hooking up with an older man. Here Parrish is exhibiting both trust in the reader and juxtaposition skill. The found text could line up with the main story in a number of ways; working out how is up to you.

On 23 October 2018, at Parliament House Canberra, Professor Glyn Davis launched the second volume of former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s memoirs, The PM Years. Here is a transcript. ABR is grateful to Professor Davis for allowing us to reproduce his speech. Our review of The PM Years will follow. Neal Blewett reviewed the first volume for ABR.

 

A decade on …

G’day. My name is Glyn Davis. I’m an academic interested in public policy but, importantly for this purpose, a friend of Kevin Rudd and his family over several decades. So I speak as someone keen to acknowledge Kevin’s achievement in this new text and the government it describes.

And this is a homecoming of sorts. Ten years ago, I joined one thousand Australians here at Parliament House for the 2020 Summit. Kevin flatters us by calling it a ‘gathering of the talents’ in his second volume of memoirs, The PM Years.

Like Kevin, that Summit attracted many critics. Kevin promised as much before the event, saying – and I quote – ‘the Australian body politic is all too ready to ridicule anyone, or any institution, dedicated to the world of ideas’. Certainly, some in the media did not welcome disruption of the rituals of politics. One aggrieved television reporter at the Summit complained about the lack of lively pictures. ‘Can’t you make them move around a bit?’ she asked. ‘They’re just sitting talking.’ For others, everything was wrong – the selection of participants, the choice of topics, the venue with its suggestion that the unelected can debate ideas in this place. The powers that be at Parliament precluded the Summit organisers from using either chamber.

But most of the commentary, then and since, joined that report in doubting the value of people sitting around talking about ideas. Apparently public policy should be immediate, always tangible, quickly digested. Something must happen, straight away, or the event is worthless.

Yet ideas take time to percolate. The 2020 Summit saw the first sustained public conversation about what became the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a proposal that developed into the Ken Henry tax review, the discussion of a national broadband network, a call for recognition of Indigenous peoples in the constitution.

It seemed the right moment for bold policy thinking. 2008 began with the moving apology to Indigenous Australians, followed by Ross Garnaut’s landmark report on climate change and its implications. The Summit followed in April.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd onscreen in Federation Square, Melbourne, apologising to the Stolen Generations, 13 February 2008 (photograph by Virginia Murdoch via Flickr/Wikimedia Commons)

But sometimes events outrun aspiration. Just over the horizon, not yet quite visible, waited the Global Financial Crisis. Keeping Australia from recession or worse became the consuming concern of government. The Summit agenda was put aside for more pressing matters. This would prove a pattern for the Rudd government, as for President Barack Obama – the urgent pushing aside the long term, the times rarely allowing a return.

Yet thinking about ideas did not stop because the financial system froze. The PM Years describes policy innovations from tax to communications, federalism to health care. Machinery of government changes, too, find a place in these pages. From this former senior public servant there is a passionate defence of an independent and professional public service, and an account of their achievements.

On this other tenth anniversary, the chapters on the Global Financial Crisis are particularly compelling, a privileged account from the Lodge of global panic as the apparent solidity of financial systems melted into air. Later, there is the drama of Copenhagen. Nations could cooperate on financial policy, but not, it turned out, on climate action.

Amid crises is the quotidian daily work of government, new programs for paid parental leave, the gatherings of the G20, the hidden drama of preparing an annual budget. Perhaps it will be just people like me, interested in policy making, who focus on the account of ‘programmatic specificity’, as Kevin memorably called the responsibility of making choices.

Inevitably, the wider public reception of The PM Years will focus just on passages dealing with the cutting down of a prime minister – still shocking in 2010, now alas an accustomed part of Australian parliamentary life. In a room of political reporters, I leave the professionals to assess the account of coup and counter-coup offered in the volume. I note only that the narrative reprises the candour already displayed in Not for the Faint‑hearted: A personal reflection on life, politics and purpose. Or as Robert Manne wrote about Volume One in the Sydney Morning Herald (23 October 2017), this is an ‘almost always engrossing and sometimes surprisingly self-critical autobiography’.

There is celebration of success, certainly, but pain and distress, too. The epigram for The PM Years is drawn from a Shakespearean comedy – ‘love all, trust a few, do wrong to none’ – but this is not a story in which all ends well, with characters reconciled and the world put to rights.

The former prime minister has a famously forensic mind and attention to detail. This is evident whether he is writing about fiscal policy, about foreign policy choices – or in assessing motive among colleagues. Hence there are passage that make for painful reading, flashes when dishonesty is detected, moments of puzzlement and hurt, sometimes of miscalculation. And even amid 600 pages of text, some things remain unknowable. Amid conflict we cannot comprehend the state of anyone else’s soul – and, sometimes, our own.

Kevin Rudd (Pan Macmillan)

Nonetheless, Kevin recalls with gratitude the political allies who stayed by him, and the enduring importance of family. The dedication to the volume makes this clear –

To Thérèse, Jessica, Nicholas and Marcus,
who stood with me alone in the prime minister’s courtyard on 24 June 2010, the day after the coup.
And every day since.

Kevin here acknowledges the brutality of politics as played in this building, and the price for those around our political leaders. No one who saw the photo of that courtyard media conference, reproduced in this book, could miss the distress on family faces.

Trauma brings some hard lessons. In Opposition, Kevin courted the media with skill, and enjoyed support from the Murdoch media empire before his election as prime minister in 2007. There was little love subsequently. The PM Years includes a generous spread of News Corporation front pages and cartoons attacking the prime minister. In 2013, Rupert Murdoch joined the fray directly, tweeting his displeasure at Rudd PM. Kevin concludes that, like great powers, New Corporation has fleeting alliances but enduring interests. This finds him in common cause with another deposed leader, Malcolm Turnbull.

It turns out that Turnbull PM could have benefited from another Rudd lesson learned the hard way. After the experience of 2010, the briefly restored Rudd introduced new caucus rules. These lift the threshold for challenging a serving Labor leader. The rule change has contributed to leadership stability after so much upheaval.

Such steadfastness has been absent across the aisle. A minimum seventy-five per cent party room vote for any leadership spill while in government, now adopted by Labor, would have saved Malcolm Turnbull in September 2018, and Kevin Rudd in June 2010. Ironically, the same rule might also have protected Kim Beazley in December 2006, when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard challenged successfully for the Labor leadership. Politics is a tough teacher, with a cruel fondness for irony.

Since this is an autobiography through to 2013, there is a second act to this political life. We read about the appointment as Minister for Foreign Affairs, the years of global diplomacy. This returns to the international themes prominent in Volume One. Foreign Minister Rudd meets global characters great and small, from the generals of Myanmar to heads of state willing to discuss Australia’s campaign for a seat on the Security Council. Kevin travels in Asia, Africa, and Mexico, worries about decisions by the Israeli government, argues with Prime Minister Gillard about Libya and the future of the Australia Network.

His return to the ministry is brief. There is a further stint in the naughty corner on the backbench, and finally Kevin takes on the ‘poison chalice’, as he describes leading government to a modest defeat in 2013. Like the closing scenes from Troy, the citadel of power falls without sound. We witness in mute silence the tumble of one prime minister and the brief elevation of her successor.

Amid the carnage, this autobiography ends by asking whether forgiveness, healing and reconciliation are possible in politics. Kevin knows that he, like other people, is part rational, part physical, and part emotional. It is hard for anyone to move on after bitterness, yet the autobiography closes with a vow: ‘Too many people in Australian public life remain consumed by ancient hatreds. I do not intend to be among them.’

This book may revive, for a while, some of those ancient hatreds. Over time it might be read differently – as a firsthand account of a moment when Australia managed economic chaos with skill, only to fail before the challenge of emissions policy following Copenhagen.

In The PM Years, Kevin Rudd tells the story of a government struggling – as all do – to manage politics and policy, to find a humane yet effective migration policy, or a national consensus on energy. He documents the moment Australian politics became marred by instability – with Canberra as the coup capital of the world.

Along the way, in his open, vernacular style, the former prime minister gives us a thoughtful account of power and its perils – the opportunities of office, the entrenched interests encountered, the internal pressures that splits asunder people once friends. He reminds us that doing is harder than commentary – as those who pushed him aside discovered in their turn.

For this leader we see something of the risks weighed, the key cabinet decisions, the paths not taken. We get to know someone who cares about policy ideas – a sort of one-man roving summit. We watch as an experienced official leads the Council of Australian Governments, builds national partnerships, gives Australia a voice in global discussions.

Kevin shares the disappointments, too, political and personal, those wild blasts of treachery and weirdness that blow sometimes through the business of politics – the ambition and the damage done.

Every Australian who lived through those years, and those who study Australian history in the future, will have a view about Kevin Rudd. With The PM Years, Australians can meet the man for themselves. They yet may be surprised what they discover.

So, with congratulations to the author, and warm regards to Thérèse and the family, it is an honour to launch Kevin Rudd’s The PM Years.

The left has an appalling habit of handing over its best ideas to the right. A non-exhaustive list might include: the ideal of common citizenship, anti-tribalism, belief in artistic quality, ribald humour, irony, working-class solidarity, the existence of disinterested truth. Free speech – the rallying cries of radical Berkeley students in the 1960s – is now typically a right-wing cause, deployed in the defence of bargain-basement provocateurs and social-media demagogues. Libertarian leftists who defend freedom of speech in principle, such as Noam Chomsky, seem ever closer to extinction.

Universities have become a target for the right. Conservative pundits deride them as epicentres for politically correct groupthink, where excitable millennials are indoctrinated in identity politics and victimhood. A whole lexicon has emerged: generation snowflake, safe spaces, trigger warnings, no-platforming, micro-aggressions, cancel culture, cultural appropriation. Viral YouTube clips of screaming students from Yale and Evergreen College have reinforced the impression of a campus shorn of civility and liberal tolerance. Though university leaders in Australia have been quick to take a ‘nothing to see here’ line, the issue has nonetheless crept relentlessly up the political agenda in this country too, with government inquiries and reports on the state of free speech in universities.

It is into this arena that Academic Freedom strides. Oxford University Press might have used the catchphrase, ‘Too much heat? We bring light!’ for the Engaging Philosophy series in which this essay collection partakes (they can have that for free). This series laudably aims to bring cool philosophical treatment to controversial issues, cutting through the bluster and fug of the culture wars. The eleven essays in this volume bring much needed rigour and depth of analysis from leading philosophers, including the likes of the Irish political theorist (and occasional denizen of ANU) Philip Pettit and star philosopher and legal theorist Martha Nussbaum. The volume is divided into five sections investigating the rationale for academic freedom, its parameters, new challenges such as micro-aggressions and political correctness, and a final section on protests and no-platforming.

Anger and indignation seem to dominate headlines around the world these days. Angry citizens are found in every corner rallying against social injustice and global warming. Angry politicians in the West call for new walls, impervious to the plight of refugees and threatening a new round of trade wars. In stark contrast, China’s new leadership seems to be happy to climb aboard and steady the rocking ship. Take for example Xi Jinping’s confident speech earlier this year at Davos championing the cause of globalisation and measures to combat climate change. How could Western élites not feel reassured that China is on their side when it comes to tackling the challenges that lie ahead in the future? For all their wishful thinking, this may be the wrong approach to make sense of China’s vision for the future.

In a 1974 paper, American philosopher Thomas Nagel famously wondered what it was like to be a bat. He concluded that we could never know what it was like to be a member of a different species – that the inner lives of animals are ultimately inaccessible to us. In Consciousness Explained (1991), Daniel C. Dennett, while acknowledging the influence of Nagel’s thought experiment, offered a rebuttal: any ‘interesting or theoretically important’ aspects of a bat’s consciousness, he argued, would be open to third-person observation. We could know, in other words, what it was like to be a bat – or a horse or goldfish for that matter – by simply looking.

In 2002, journalist Guy Rundle published a piece devoted to the little-known visit by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges to Melbourne in May 1938. During his ten-day stay, Borges spent time in the domed reading room of the State Library, a place he found ‘awe-inspiring, even overwhelming’. As a long-term reader of Borges, and having spent much of my working life at the Library, I felt elated by this connection. Alas, the story turned out to be a hoax, though not before it circulated widely on the internet. With hindsight, I realise that I – and others – believed it because we wanted to believe that this writer who composed such eloquent stories about books and libraries, and who later held the position as director of the National Library in Buenos Aires, had been awestruck by our library.

‘Absolutely charming – slim, handsome, nice speaking voice and manner, a super-gent’: it might be a line from an old-fashioned dalliance column, but it is from one of the letters published in this volume, and Patrick Leigh Fermor, writing to one of his most regular and lustrous correspondents, Debo Devonshire, youngest of the Mitford clan, is not advertising himself – well, not quite – but lavishing his superlatives on another celebrity of the day, film actor Dirk Bogarde. It was 1956, and Bogarde was playing Fermor in the Michael Powell movie Ill Met by Moonlight (1957), based on an incident in World War II when Fermor commanded an Anglo-Cretan contingent that abducted and evacuated a German general. ‘The ghost of oneself twelve years ago,’ Fermor can’t help adding in his encomium to the actor.

In December 2015, Israel’s Ministry of Education banned Dorit Rabinyan’s prize-winning novel All the Rivers from the high school curriculum on the grounds that the story of a romance between an Israeli woman and a Palestinian man ‘threatens separate identity and promotes intermarriage’. Far-right Education Minister Naftali Bennett backed the decision, claiming that the book not only encourages assimilation but also compares the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to Hamas. All the attention made the book a bestseller, but Rabinyan became a target on social media, where she was cursed and threatened. She was spat on in the street.

All the Rivers, now available in English, is a suspenseful, engaging, painful story. It chronicles the relationship in New York between Liat, a translator student from Tel Aviv, the secular capital of Israel, and Hilmi, a Hebron-born painter from Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinians. When Liat first meets Hilmi, voices are already active in her head: ‘What do you think you’re doing? You’re playing with fire ... What do you need this for?’ Liat experiences simultaneously both attraction and fear. She wants to surrender herself to Hilmi, but she is afraid of falling in love with a Palestinian.

In 1784 William Bryant was sentenced, rather optimistically, to be transported to the American colonies. Britain had just lost the War of Independence; Bryant thus languished in a hulk in Portsmouth while Britain adjusted to the loss. This meant that when he finally arrived in New South Wales with the First Fleet, Bryant’s sentence was set to expire in just three years. Perhaps he did not trust imperial record-keeping – not without cause; perhaps he noticed that there was no plan to return convicts home after their sentences expired. In late March 1791, Bryant and eight others took matters into their own hands and escaped.

Good books are like recurrent dreams: haunting the reader’s waking hours by sitting, tantalisingly, on the edge of conscious thought. Take, for example, The Big Con: The story of the confidence men, David W. Maurer’s 1940 study of American grifters in the early twentieth century. Maurer’s book has dogged me ever since I revisited my old stamping ground of Berkeley, California, on the eve of Donald Trump’s unlikely ascension to the US presidency. Walking those familiar streets, talking to old friends, watching Trump’s coronation, one of the lessons of The Big Con surfaced in my mind and has done so ever since. Maurer’s rule, which he considered trite but true, was: ‘You can’t cheat an honest man.’ It was a maxim told to Maurer by the gaggle of con artists he interviewed for his linguistic and sociological study. According to the grifters, a person could only be swindled if they had ‘larceny in their veins – in other words, he must want something for nothing, or be prepared to participate in an unscrupulous deal’.

On his death in February 2012, Leslie Nicholl Walford, the man who right from the outset of his career had determined to shift Australian taste away from drab interiors filled with Victorian brown furniture, was saluted as one of Australia’s most influential interior designers. With a sensibility honed in Paris, where he attended Le Centre d’Art et de Techniques (1954–55), Walford’s preferences were more discerning and refined: the gilded elegance of fine French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century furniture, but with an appreciation also of the sleek lines of modern Scandinavian design. Over the years, from his base in the shopping village of Double Bay in the affluent eastern suburbs of his home city, he presided over a large design practice catering especially to a core circle of wealthy clients. He was the designer of choice for the Packers and the Murdochs, and he twice decorated Retford Park, the grand country mansion of James Fairfax at Bowral in the Southern Highlands. The social world in which Walford moved with practised ease – both as a member in his own right but also its servant – was later chronicled with wit and panache in the columns he wrote first for the Sun-Herald (1967–82) and later the Sunday Telegraph (1983–84). Through the 1970s he contributed a more considered ‘On Design’ column to the Sydney Morning Herald. As an influential office bearer for the Society of Interior Designers of Australia, he did much to develop interior design as a credentialled profession.

Australian Dance Theatre, the nation’s longest continuing modern dance company, was born in 1965, during the so-called Dunstan renaissance of Adelaide. Elizabeth Cameron Dalman, a dancer and teacher influenced by five transformative years in Europe, and Leslie White, a dancer and teacher trained at the Royal Ballet School, were its instigators. Combining ballet techniques with those of American modern dance, they aimed to ‘pioneer contemporary dance throughout Australia and across the world’. The company’s sympathetic chronicler, Maggie Tonkin, regards this a radical aspiration, for conservative Adelaide at least; modern dance had infiltrated the eastern states thirty years earlier.

That the company continued to achieve its ambitions under five artistic directors and two one-year transition projects is a miracle. Even at the time of its fiftieth celebrations in 2015, money was so tight, and the arts funding environment so volatile, that the company’s present artistic director, Garry Stewart, scaled back a festival to a small but respectable affair to honour the company, its founders, subsequent directors Jonathan Taylor, Leigh Warren, Bill Pengelly, and Meryl Tankard, and some three hundred dancers.

‘They rose from nothing and changed everything.’  This fantastic, fawning, fallacious guff introduced a 2016 PBS documentary on ancient Greece, and the biography of the sentiment behind it forms the subject of this unusual social history. Irritated by the fact that almost every media report, political speech, and cartoon about Greece’s current travails plays on the contrast between modern Greece and the glory that was Athens, Johanna Hanink has produced a wide-ranging and thoroughly researched analysis of Western attitudes to Greece from classical times right up to the current financial and refugee crises.

The subtitle of this book is Papua New Guinea and the Defence of Australia since 1880. Michael Somare, first prime minister of Papua New Guinea (PNG), is at the centre of the cover photograph, and the cover design uses red, yellow, and black, the colours of the PNG flag. Yet for much of this book PNG is at the periphery of the story. About two-thirds of the text concerns Indonesia: specifically, the West New Guinea dispute (1949–62) between Indonesia and the Netherlands, and Konfrontasi (1962–66), the conflict that entangled Indonesia and Malaysia. These two episodes, notes Bruce Hunt in his introduction, illuminate the strategic importance of PNG to Australian governments. Scholars of Australia’s foreign and defence relations, and those interested in Indonesia, will find more in this book than will historians of PNG.

Which poets have most influenced you?

I work for an outfit called Narrative Verse in English, our company founder being a man called Geoff, Geoff Chaucer. After him it’s up for grabs, though given what I write, Pope, Byron, Browning. Clough, Meredith, Frost, and Kenneth Koch rate very highly. I’d like to have been influenced by Auden, but alas I wasn’t. Outside of English … Juvenal and Pessoa.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Both inspiration without craft and craft without inspiration are useless.

When German forces invaded France on 10 May 1940, the French signed an armistice that facilitated limited French sovereignty in the south, the section of the country not yet overrun by German troops. On 10 July 1940 the French Parliament elected a new, collaborationist regime under former general Philippe Pétain. What little sovereignty Vichy managed to maintain ended in November 1942 when the Germans occupied the rest of France. At this point, Vichy became largely a puppet regime for the rest of the war. The nature and extent of the Vichy government’s collaboration with the Nazis, in particular the French police’s role in rounding up and deporting French Jews, remains a national wound and a subject of ongoing historical debate.

Much of this controversy revolves around the fate of individuals such as Françoise Frenkel. Polish by birth, she undertook an arts degree at the Sorbonne before 1914 and an internship at a bookshop on Rue Gay-Lussac before moving in 1921 to Berlin, where, together with her husband, Simon Reichenstein, she established that city’s first French bookshop. While her husband fled to Paris when the Nazis seized power in 1933, Frenkel remained in Berlin, determined to keep her bookstore open as long as possible. On the eve of war, in July 1939, she finally left for Paris. With the German invasion of France, she fled yet again to the Southern Zone. So began three years of life on the run and in hiding, her experience paradigmatic of the thousands of Jewish non-nationals attempting to find safe haven from the Nazis in what had once been a welcoming France.

There appears to be a major problem with the story of Leonora Carrington’s life (1917–2011): it hasn’t been told enough. This may be because, as in the case of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Carrington is often overshadowed by the male Surrealist artists with whom she associated herself – especially her lover Max Ernst – or it may be because our understanding and appreciation of her genius is still in its infancy. Either way, Carrington’s art and writings, and the tumultuous life they are inextricably linked to, have not received the attention they deserve.

The salient details of Carrington’s life are well known to art historians and scholars of Surrealism. They are the stuff of a good page-turner. Carrington was born in Lancashire, to a phenomenally wealthy family. Her father, Harold Carrington, owned a textile manufacturing business and later became the majority stakeholder of Imperial Chemical Industries. Fiercely rebellious, Carrington was expelled from a string of boarding schools. From a young age she was interested in art and literature. She refused to conform to the conventions of the British upper class, which she found suffocating. In 1935, after being a debutante at George V’s court, she moved to London to become an artist. There, she met one of the most important members of the Surrealist movement, Max Ernst, twenty-six years her senior. Carrington’s father, keen to end their relationship, tried to have Ernst arrested. The lovers escaped to France, and Carrington’s father disowned her. In Paris, through Ernst, she joined the beating heart of the Surrealist movement. After Britain and France declared war on Germany in 1939, Ernst was imprisoned for being a citizen of the German Reich in France. Shortly after, to escape the impending Nazi occupation, Carrington fled to Spain, leaving Ernst behind in a French concentration camp. In Madrid she suffered the mental breakdown that became the theme of her searing memoir, Down Below (1988, since republished by NYRB). Her father had her interned at Villa Covadonga, a psychiatric clinic in Santander. To check on her, Carrington’s parents sent her nanny to Spain in a submarine. Ultimately, the family decided that Carrington should be admitted to a sanatorium in South Africa, where she would be out of sight and out of mind – no further embarrassment. Before being shipped to Cape Town, Carrington escaped and married Mexican poet and diplomat Renato Leduc, whom she had met through Picasso. As Leduc’s wife and a newly minted Mexican citizen, she could finally escape her father’s reach. Like other European artists and intellectuals who settled in Mexico as refugees, she befriended Rivera and Kahlo, among others, and in time, became one of the country’s most celebrated artists.

What charming company she is, Anna Cowen – warm, energetic, amusing, enthusiastic. And what a job that must have been: partnering Zelman Cowen when Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser appointed him governor-general of Australia in 1977. John Kerr, Cowen’s predecessor, had called the very existence of the office of governor-general into disrepute in 1975 when he sacked Prime Minister Gough Whitlam; Kerr was loathed by Labor supporters. The Cowens, unaligned politically, were a good choice. ‘Healing’ was the word that they chose as their mission for their five years in Government House.

Anna, usually called Anne, was fifty-two, a mother of four, when they moved to Yarralumla. When the press asked her what it would all mean for her, she pictured a governor-general’s wife ‘with an air of authority (and perhaps a tiara) [and] a slightly distant or aloof bearing. There was no way I could do any of that – it wasn’t in my DNA. I would simply have to be myself and hope that would be acceptable.’

Later, she met predecessors – Maie Casey, writer, artist, and aviatrix (no tiaras there), and brilliant author Alexandra Hasluck, whose wardrobe had included a tiara but who assured Anne that it was no use when Paul Hasluck’s stint as governor-general was over. Being the wife of the governor-general meant being driven around in a Rolls Royce with a police escort; living at Yarralumla or at Admiralty House overlooking Sydney Harbour, where her principal responsibilities were hosting a jaw-dropping number of dinners, lunches, receptions, and eminent visitors; and, above all, being with her husband on those occasions that required them to appear as a couple. Anne’s chief anxiety was persuading people to mingle and remembering enough names to help her to mingle with them herself.

Being the wife of a ‘healing’ governor-general meant accepting a prodigious number of invitations from all over Australia. Extremely demanding this became: one day, their engagements meant spending six hours in the air; on another they had nine engagements and three flights. Sometimes they had to travel in evening dress, with decorations. Zelman ‘liked this stuff’, she noted: when he was wearing all his regalia she thought that he ‘looked like a Christmas tree’. A needlewoman, she fashioned him a ‘happy coat’ to wear on such flights so that his formal coat was not so crushed when they arrived.

Zelman insisted on writing all the necessary speeches himself. A ‘Renaissance Man’ the President of the Australian Academy of Science dubbed this constitutional lawyer. Anne, receiving invitations herself, decided that she should follow suit; she had Arts and Social Work degrees from the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford, and she was willing to work hard at preparing something apposite to say. She argued for mothers being able to accompany their children when they had to spend time in hospital. Concerned about the position of women, she congratulated Ita Buttrose on the Women’s Weekly’s path-breaking survey on women, noting her agreement with ‘women’s libbers’ after she had had to sit through a beauty contest. But even when she spoke about new roles for women in the late 1970s, she held that they should remain at home while their children were young. In conversation with Eve Mahlab, she lamented ‘impermanence in marriages’. She herself had been a young bride, married at nineteen. Throughout these years, Anne recorded concerns about her children. The youngest, Ben, lived at Yarralumla for much of the Cowens’ time there and was often troublingly alone with no one to talk to but one of the aides. The others were on their ways to careers and marriages.

From time to time, she broke the rules. She brought the whole cavalcade – Rolls and police escort – to a halt between Melbourne engagements so that she could visit her mother for four minutes. She invaded the Yarralumla kitchen to discuss with the head chef the possibility of making marmalade rather than buying jars imported from England. When she and her mother decided to show him how to make gefilte fish, they couldn’t agree on the proportions of salt and sugar.

Always, there were anxieties about the effectiveness of the post-Dismissal ‘healing’. On 23 September 1979, in Melbourne to open the Royal Show, she thought that they were ‘doubtless creating republicans right, left and centre’ when the Rolls and its escort moved out of the heavy traffic to drive along the wrong side of Flemington Road. She noted, with pleasure, conversations over dinner with Bob Hawke and Lionel Murphy, and was pleased when Fred Williams said that the Cowens had ‘set back the cause of Republicanism in this country twenty-five years’.

This was an enchanting read. I wish, though, that the usually generous and meticulous Miegunyah Press had provided more referencing and more careful proofreading for this work. I had to read several other sources to fill out the absent background of Anna Cowen’s diaries.

Apart from its value as a case study in bureaucratic corruption and incompetence caused by lack of proper oversight, Missing in Action serves as an important reminder that the trauma of Australia’s involvement in World War I did not end with the Armistice. The appalling loss of life was compounded by the ineptitude and fraud associated with the initial official attempt after the fighting had ended to identify human remains and to afford a proper burial to each of the more than 46,000 Australians who had died on Western Front. It was an enormous task; even a century later, it is far  from complete.

According to Marianne van Velzen, there are 11,000 Australians whose remains are still to be identified. Van Velzen is a Dutch-born journalist and historian whose previous books include a biography of travel writer Ernestine Hill and Bomber Boys (2017), a history of the RAAF’s 18th Bomber Squadron, which operated during World War II and whose pilots and aircrew were drawn from a group of Dutch and Australian former POWs who had escaped from  the Japanese.

The tone of Missing in Action is different from that of Bomber Boys. It is shocking, though perhaps understandable given the sensitivities of that era, to learn that the full scandal of the short-lived Australian Graves Services unit was hidden from the public. No one with significant involvement was ever held to account for the AGS’s failures, and  those politicians in the know were unwilling to make an issue of the débâcle.

Beyond the report of a secret Court of Inquiry that was instituted in 1920, it seems there is not much for historians to go on. A previous official report had been discredited following allegations of bribery by AGS officials. The Court of Inquiry found that members of the Australian Graves Services had been operating without adequate accountability: ‘Supervision of these parties is difficult and no definite record of the work is readily obtained beyond the report of the party itself. Opportunity for abuse is great and unless the most rigid discipline is maintained this work intended to sanctify and hallow the memory of the dead must develop into a serious scandal bringing humiliation and  disgrace upon the Australian Forces.’

‘Up to the date of investigation by this Court of Inquiry,’ continued the report, ‘no reasonable or definite plan of carrying out the work seems to have been formed, and many of the officers and men selected did not realise the dignity and importance of their position.’

The AGS was staffed by Australians staying on in Europe after the war, who, for one reason or another, were disinclined to return home. Australians were known to own bars called estaminets, which offered sly grog and prostitutes. Joining the AGS offered the chance to continue wartime black market activities and get something for nothing. Rorting was rampant, and large amounts of cash  and equipment simply disappeared.

Meanwhile, the work that was done to identify remains and establish cemeteries was haphazard at best. Graves established by the AGS were found to contain the wrong body, or else they were empty. The public face of the AGS was Alfred Allen, a civilian with the honorary rank of major, derived from service in the Red Cross. Allen claimed to be able to locate the bodies of Australian soldiers using a divining rod. With this device, Allen was said to find up to 100 bodies in a week. Allen was a genial Quaker whose air of respectability seems to have forestalled serious scrutiny. Reputed to possess near miraculous powers of detection, Allen was fêted in the newspapers. Van Velzen writes that ‘The photos used to illustrate these articles showed Allen as a somewhat jovial and assuring fellow; the information that this God-fearing man did not drink or swear, and was held in high esteem by his men, did a lot to set at rest the minds of those who had questioned the functioning of the AGS.’ 

Without modern forensic techniques such as DNA matching, the identification of corpses – often torn apart by explosives – that had been dumped hastily in mass graves was a haphazard as well as gruesome and time-consuming task. Allen’s impressive success contrasted with the much slower rate of positive identification achieved by the British authorities.

Bereaved families desperate for closure were vulnerable to false consolation, though there were doubts about the AGS expressed by family members – some of them wealthy and influential – who felt that they were being deflected or misled. Complaints that Allen and his colleagues were being evasive and uncooperative multiplied as Australians increasingly visited France in search of lost soldiers. Following the damning report by the Court of Inquiry, the AGS was quietly disbanded and its members allowed to fade away. While the story it tells is confronting, Missing in Action provides a necessary counterbalance to platitudes about the mateship of the diggers or stories that namecheck  certain outstanding military leaders.

Many Australians still struggle to comprehend the full horror and utter waste of World War I, preferring narratives that appear to offer some uplift. We tend to speak of the diggers as heroes and good blokes rather than as crooks and hoaxers with no sense of duty towards their fallen comrades, though in fact there were a few individuals like that.

Drive along College Crescent, the circular avenue that forms Melbourne University’s northern order, and you will see the series of sedate, handsome university colleges that line the edge: Newman, Queen’s, Ormond, Trinity, plus the newer women’s colleges of St Mary’s, St Hilda’s, and Janet Clarke Hall. The impression today of quiet élitism and learning may be just, but the weathered stone has seen some turbulent times.

This is especially true of Newman, the first as you approach from Swanston Street, where its entrance is, but by decades the last of the four church colleges and the most controversial in its formation and architecture – a revolutionary design by Walter Burley Griffin, architect of Canberra. For more than six decades – as Trinity hosted Anglican students, Ormond Presbyterians, and Queen’s Methodists – the space set aside at Melbourne University for Catholics lay vacant. It was used by Catholics for picnics, the Carlton Football Club held matches there, and a herd of cows was pastured there until their lowing disturbed the sleep of the Master of Trinity College.

The arrival of Daniel Mannix – archbishop from 1917 to 1963 – in Melbourne in 1913 was the turning point. He believed that the way for Catholics to take their rightful place among the leaders and professionals was via the secular university. With Mannix, an irresistible if permanently irascible driving force, the largely working-class Irish Catholics got their own university college. In 2018, Newman College’s centenary, it is easy to overlook how vital a role it played in lifting Catholics in Melbourne, giving them confidence and opportunities.

A glamorous and beautifully produced history by three Melbourne historians – sisters Brenda Niall and Frances O’Neill, and Josephine Dunin – offers a refreshingly forthright account, including controversies and confrontations. It may be vanity publishing – the publisher is listed as Newman College – but it is lavish, meticulous, and marvellously illustrated with evocative photos from across the college’s history. It is an important record of the progress of Catholics in Melbourne from largely Irish and poor to occupation of the professions and social equality, told through the experiences and anecdotes of a century of students.

Newman was based on the bounty of a Sydney philanthropist, Thomas Donovan, who detested the Griffin’s design and never set foot in the college, but exercised a strong and often irritating influence on college policy, especially the bursaries he generously funded. (Gerard Murphy, the wise and urbane rector for three decades, solved one potential confrontation by having Donovan’s portrait painted and hung in the dining room.)

By the time Newman opened, the Irish Mannix had become a deeply divisive political figure because of his support for Irish nationalism (including the 1916 Easter Rising) and opposition to conscription. Just a week before 40,000 people turned out to see the college opened on 24 March, thousands of Catholics had marched up Collins Street to the steps of Parliament House where Mannix awaited. A counter-demonstration days later by supporters of empire and conscription demanded that Mannix be deported.

From the start, Mannix had the Jesuits in mind to run Newman (as they still do), though his hard-nosed demands made negotiations difficult. The intention was to provide opportunities ,especially for poor and rural Catholics, but for much of its history – the authors say – Newman was both élitist and not particularly academic, with sport outranking study. Although scholarships helped, Newman was peopled for decades largely by students from Xavier College, St Patrick’s in Ballarat, and St Kevin’s.

Newman benefited from some outstanding leadership, especially by the first (acting) rector  Father James O’Dwyer, who comes across as generous-spirited and intelligent, Father Jeremiah Murphy (1923–53), and the current rector, Bill Uren, who had a stint from 1986 to 1990 and took over again in 2006. One nice story indicative of Murphy’s character is when a group of students amused themselves by changing places at the dinner table with a group from another college; ‘he didn’t expel the intruders. Instead, he subjected them to an inordinately long Grace, in Latin.’

The book focuses on the controversial ‘initiations’, which often involved liberal applications of water by ‘bucketing’ or ‘ponding’. Some took this in their stride, some found it unpleasant and bullying. One student, whose suit got soaked, appeared in another suit which was also soaked. The perpetrators could not believe their luck when he appeared in a third suit, only to be told that the suits were their own. Father Uren ultimately changed and softened the initiations to a more acceptable ‘orientation’.

Many students had to supplement their income. Law student Jack Galbally, later a noted barrister and Victorian Labor minister, worked as a car salesman, shop assistant, primary school teacher, fruit picker, and waterfront labourer. Other Newman luminaries include the noted pre-historian John Mulvaney; philosopher Max Charlesworth, Victorian Governor James Gobbo; federal Liberal cabinet minister Kevin Andrews; medical scientist Jack Martin; barrister, philanthropist, and Melbourne University chancellor Allan Myers;  and Tony Abbott’s Prime Ministerial chief of staff, Peta Credlin.

Credlin was a beneficiary of Newman’s decision to go coeducational in the late 1970s, the last of the Melbourne University residential colleges to do so. The transition was made more difficult by the loutish behaviour of many male residents, the book recounts.

There are two howlers: the book has Russia invading Germany in 1941 rather than the other way round, and George Pell as archbishop of Melbourne in 1989, seven years early.

Newman’s story can be read many ways, the authors conclude. One is a Catholic success story in Australia’s social history; an alternative is generations of ‘young men getting drunk and keeping their minds closed while doing just enough study’. They prefer to read the history as ‘a story of struggle, which isn’t resolved, but which is about becoming open’. Newman College is certainly opened here.

When I look at certain images of German-born photographer Roman Vishniac, the accompanying pain is acute, for his mesmerising monochromatic portraits of Eastern European Jews before their devastation in the Holocaust are not mere ethnological studies. Elie Wiesel refers to Vishniac as ‘poet of memory, elegist of ruined hopes’ in the foreword to A Vanished World (1983). The same might be said of Serge Liberman, as attested to by the twenty-eight works that form The Storyteller. Within these stories a particular world is revisited, one on the brink of disappearing; the fractured community of those Jewish refugees who found home in Australia. There is also the robust reality of their burgeoning families.

Along with the despair elicited by the magical conjuring act of Liberman’s writing – for these survivors cannot help but evoke all who were lost – is pleasure in these characters’ familiarity. All are carefully wrought: their preoccupations, angst, the rich cadences of a language that encapsulated the poetic, the ribald, and the depths of suffering, the folkloric tales of rabbis, peddlars (as evoked by Sholem Aleichem before him), dybbuks, and Jewish mothers who appear alternately as adored figures singing Yiddish lullabies or characters who are less benign.

Humour sometimes emerges, but there is always the keen recognition that this fraught relationship between parents and children – whose young bodies flourish in the free expanse of the Australian landscape and who cultivate Australian accents – are marked by silences around words as chasmic as ‘Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka’. One of the child narrators (‘The First Lesson’) wonders at his mother’s adjuration to ‘Go, eat something!’ when his grandmother has just died. ‘Eat? Now?’ he silently rails. But what else is there to say in the face of this terrifying loss of her mother, with whom she survived the unutterable?

Liberman’s family came to Melbourne as postwar Jewish refugees in 1951. During his writing career – he published six short story collections – he won the Alan Marshall Award thrice and was a recipient of the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award. This posthumous collection – Liberman died in 2017 – has been edited by Professor Richard Freadman and writer Alex Skovron as a celebration of his work and in the hope of resuscitating his literary reputation. Liberman, despite recognition from Australian writers such as Skovron and Arnold Zable, has gone the way of many writers. Earlier this month, publisher Peter Mayer died. Mayer, remembered for his daring decision to publish The Satanic Verses when CEO at Penguin in the United States and the United Kingdom, countered the idea of fashionable writing: ‘The real issue ought to be, is the book readable, is it valuable, is it good? Who cares if it’s old or new?’ When it comes to publishers and readers, the answer is undeniably; too many.

The Storyteller teems with humanity and often grapples with questions of life, meaning, and belief. Like the European tradition which he admires, Liberman does not shy away from these topics or styles, often shunned in the Australian environment because of their serious-mindedness, dramatic content, and intellectualism. Liberman dallies with modes like the macabre in ‘Raphael Lazurus, The Painter’ and a comedic uncanny in ‘Keinfreind’s Golem’. In the former, the artist cannot help but portray his subjects in their future states of decay, thereby imposing these fates upon them. In the second, a wealthy art dealer creates a Golem to guard his treasures, but finds himself subsequently trapped by his own greed.

Among these characters, not all of them Jewish, are two recurring figures; the doctor and the ‘scribbler’. As they go about on their house visits, these doctors observe their patients intimately. These often empathic physicians are compassionate voices of reason, like their Chekhovian forebears. They leave the reader wondering at the evolving clinical nature of the medical profession and what the subsequent toll has been for both parties. Some of these doctors find themselves confronting serious crises of belief.

The ‘scribblers’ appear in various stages of their careers and states of success. Some write in Yiddish, others in English. A struggling shoemaker’s literary talents are revealed when his ambitious son, a stalling writer, discovers his notebooks and realises that his perceptions of his father, ‘a little man, with little ambition, little talent’, were erroneous (‘Envy’s Fire’). A respected writer holds court with other writers and poets in the Cosmopol Café on St Kilda’s iconic Acland Street until he is accosted by an unlikely messiah (‘Messiah in Acland Street’). And a young boy, who might and might not be Serge, is advised by his Yiddish teacher that his ‘duty lies in telling of everything that this generation’ have lived through; warning him not to be mired in the past. This is ultimately Liberman’s feat, rendering in resplendent though precise language the humanity around him with vivacity, and sometimes embracing pessimism. As the doctor narrator declaims silently in ‘Jewel in the Crucible’, so did the writer: ‘Let them come, I thought let them come. For humanity I am ready. / I am ready. / I am ready. / Let them come.’ Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva once wrote, ‘I don’t eavesdrop, I listen attentively. Just like a doctor does: the chest.’ One suspects that Liberman’s considerable talent derived from his ability to do just this, both as doctor and writer.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Sydney University in the 1990s. I co-edited Hermes and started a little journal for a class run by Elizabeth Webby. Afterwards, Elizabeth invited me to work on Southerly. That was my real start. In 1998, I was living in Paris and came across Blanchot’s chapbooks published by Fata Morgana and Fourbis at FNAC Montparnasse. Inspired, Vagabond Press began quietly, releasing two titles the next year. Twenty years of unpaid labour followed. 

What was the first book you published?

Excluding chapbooks in the Rare Object series, they were David Brooks’s Description, Chris Edwards’s Utensils in a Landscape, and Andrew Zawacki’s Masquerade in 2000–01. Vagabond Press started out very cottage industry, running the first Rare Objects through an old Hewlett Packard 4L. It couldn’t handle duplex printing, so I had to print one side, collate, and then print the other. Kay Orchison printed cover images on large sheets of Hahnemühle 300gsm etching paper with a clunky Epson Photo EX, which we then tore and stuck together with gluesticks. Later, we farmed out the printing, but the process for covers remained the same. With Elizabeth Allen and Jane Gibian, we spent hundreds of hours sticking those images on over fifteen years.

Do you edit the books you commission?

January 21

I am roaring through Edmund White’s memoir of his Paris years (Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris), much better than his New York memoir (City Boy). But there is a problem: one doesn’t believe a word he writes. His is possibly the laziest approach to autobiography. Still, this one is reasonably entertaining.

January 24

Lunch at KereKere with my old friend and colleague Brian McFarlane. Indefatigable as ever, Brian will soon complete his book on Googie Withers and John MacCallum. I hadn’t realised that Brian – the kid from Lillimur in the Wimmera – went to Melbourne University aged sixteen. His first year was lamentable scholastically, perhaps because he saw 104 films.       

January 28

To Government House for the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Michael Heyward likened the tawdry ballroom to a large version of the Clunes Town Hall. I stood with Lisa Gorton, who has just given me a fine long article on David Malouf’s poetry. After the five awards had been announced by the premier and his hoarse arts minister, we both went over and commiserated with Brendan Ryan (Jennifer Maiden, as is so often the case, won the poetry prize). Brendan, sensible man, was philosophical. The ballroom was suffocating; it was forty-two degrees outside. They opened the doors just as the cool change arrived and most people moved onto the terrace. I congratulated Alex Miller on his win.

January 30

Lunched with Ian Donaldson, at Blue Train. I asked him to write something about his old friend Barry Humphries, who turns eighty on February 17. I didn’t know that Humphries fell off a cliff in Cornwall in the 1970s. He and his wife Rosalind were staying in a pedigreed cottage owned by the family of Tamsin Donaldson. Barry landed fifty metres below, with a broken leg. I bet he still went on stage that night.

January 8

Read Henry James’s early tale ‘Poor Richard’. When the eponymous dissolute learns of Gertrude’s unsavoury engagement to Major Luttrel, he descends on her house, determined to end it. Finding her wan and failing, he condemns her attachment to the venal Luttrel: ‘You have suited – God knows what! – your despair, your desolation.’

Did James ever create an uncomplicatedly happy couple or an erotically assured character?

January 11

Andrea Goldsmith’s for dinner. Her guests included the visiting Jonathan Mills, who has two more Edinburgh festivals to go as director. The theme of his last one will be, not surprisingly, the Great War; this year it is Technology. (We thought of going to the former, not the latter.) Andrea knows Jonathan because of his and Dorothy Porter’s The Ghost Wife: that brilliant collaboration.

January 15

Drove to Deakin to see David McCooey, who has agreed to become our poetry editor. I’ve always done it, but it’s time someone else chose the poems – and I can use the extra time.

In this month’s Quadrant, Keith Windschuttle fulminates against the Literature Board and labels ABR left-wing. That must be why I am wearing pink shirts. Clearly Windschuttle doesn’t read us closely. He accuses us of ignoring Quadrant Books completely, overlooking recent reviews of Quadrant stalwarts Peter Ryan and Les Murray himself.

January 16

Hot again – forty degrees – so we retreated to the Como and enjoyed Hitchcock, with Hopkins in his least mannered role: none of those laconic sidelong looks. Perhaps he couldn’t manage them in that extraordinary makeup. Actors have so much done to their faces these days (Hopkins was joined by Helen Mirren and Toni Colette). Cosmetically, it was like a War of the Lips.

January 5

Dmetri Kakmi has landed himself in hot water with his Age article on the disgraced cricket writer, Peter Roebuck, who committed suicide late last year because of his penchant for spanking African boys. The Pharisees are livid because Dmetri suggested that ‘The act of caning for sexual purposes is a two-way psycho-drama.’ Much more shocking, I thought, was Dmetri’s claim that Montgomery Clift played the murdered homosexual Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer.

January 7

Read Henry James’s astonishing early tale ‘A Light Man’. The scene when Maximus Austin conquers, or seduces, the predatory Sloane (the ‘touched, inflamed, inspired’ collector of good-looking young men) surely disproves any notion of HJ’s sexual indifference. I love those early tales, so sprightly, lyric, poetic. He describes a sky of ‘bending blues’. Wallace Stevens would be happy with that.

This led me back to Leon Edel’s biography of James (typically silent on the subject of entertaining Mr Sloane). More interesting to Edel is the vignette that follows, when HJ met, or glimpsed, Dickens at a dinner party, during his reading tour of 1867, when HJ joined 1000 people in the queue for tickets. HJ attended the dinner party briefly and met the great novelist, his hero, in the foyer. Nothing was said; no handshake: but Dickens trained his ‘mercilessly military eye’ on HJ, silencing him. I recalled a similar experience in Sydney, back in 1980. I went in search of Patrick White after checking into my hotel on Hunter Street, only to bump into him on Pitt Street, round the corner, as White emerged from a chemist shop. With those handsome grey critical eyes he looked at me mercilessly, militaristically, before moving on.

January 8

I read HJ’s dullish and drably titled Travelling Companions and Hawthorne’s ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’, which is similarly set in Padua. Then I looked at HJ’s The Painter’s Eye, his collection of writings (much of it early journalism) about ‘the pictorial arts’. He is unerringly funny and often savage. Those who deprecate James as super-civilised, courtly, maidenly have no idea how mordant he could be. Here he is on two ‘elder Academicians’: of their work ‘it is but common humanity not to speak. Their contributions, raggedly and cruelly squaring themselves upon the “line”, must be seen to be believed in.’

He also mentions Millais’ painting The Bride of Lammermoor. Not having read the Scott I hadn’t realised that the Master of Ravenswood rescues poor Lucy Ashton from a wild bull. What a shame Donizetti didn’t set that scene for Sutherland and Pavarotti to enact.

HJ is very amusing about the English passion for ‘goodiness’ in its pictures.

January 9

My first day back at work. The people at Adelaide Writers’ Week want to repeat Robert Dessaix’s Seymour Biography Lecture, so I rang Robert early. (‘Pietro’, he began … ‘Roberto’, I said.) He said he was off to have his hair cut. I congratulated him on having this done at nine a.m. on a Monday. He’s off to Launceston tomorrow and said he couldn’t possibly go there unkempt. He found my poem ‘Crimson Crop’ rather gruelling; he is currently on a régime of blood thinners, because of his recent heart attack. Last week they attached a leech to him for six hours. He laughed about the ‘bootful’ of blood spurting over his bed.

Nolan and his comic cobber

 

Sidney Nolan
Thames & Hudson
Reviewed by Robert Hughes
(Artist and art critic of Nation)

 

This article was originally published in the November 1961 issue of ABR.

 

Thames & Hudson’s Nolan book is in danger of becoming a standard work. It should not. It is a blatant promotion job, with few claims to be a serious evaluation of Nolan’s oeuvre. Consider the ‘invisible criticism’ first: the selection of the plates for reproduction. The work on which Nolan’s reputation will ultimately rest, is underplayed: that is, the Kelly series of 1946–47, the early Fraser­ Bracefell picture of 1947–48, the Queensland paintings, some of the explorer series, the Central Australian landscapes. The emphasis, in the text and in the volume of reproduction, is on Nolan’s post-1950 work. But with the carcass paintings of 1952, Nolan’s ability to manipulate an image accelerates, his power to invent one declines.

There is a forced repetitiousness in the later Kellys of 1954–57, a confused slickness in the rainforest paintings, a too­heavy leaning on Monet in the later Frasers and Bracefells, and the neat thumbprint of Bond Street on Leda. The latest studies, for his new Gallipoli series, have the slight gloss of an unreal solution.

Now consider the statistics: two of the first Kelly series reproduced, seventeen of the second; and, in all, only twenty-eight of the 119 paintings and drawings reproduced are dated earlier than 1951. No less than sixty-nine of the reproductions are listed as ‘collection of the artist’, or ‘collection of Cynthia Nolan’. Come buy!

So the impression someone unacquainted with Nolan’s work would get from the book is of a talented, agile and eclectic lightweight. And most of the text is puff, not study. The offender is Colin MacInnes, novelist, a professional expatriate.

MacInnes’ fulsome ‘evocation’ of Australia is designed to put Nolan’s work in a context of experience. Done well, this would be valuable: it must be done for every environmental artist. But MacInnes, by rendering Australia as a Las Vegas of the independent soul, gives Nolan’s work the sentimentalised, Man­Friday-in-trousers cast which London wants as an expiation for the present staleness of its native painting.

MacInnes plays at being a new Sir John Maundeville. Do you want monstrous beasts? From his hat, he will give you Bondi sharks, which ‘cruise eagerly offshore at sixty miles an hour’. With this myth of the supercharged mako comes the kookaburra, whose voice is ‘the most insulting and degrading in creation’; and the kangaroo, of whom MacInnes notes with suffocating archness that ‘although he’s made his reputation as a boxer, he looks more like any senior member of any Australian cricket team’.

Then, he deals with the people. Australia, he writes, was exclusively a penal colony for a third of its history – that is, until 1850. Tarboys and others will be comforted to learn that ‘A sheep or cattle station is a self-contained community where work is play.’ His views on the White Australia policy are fatuous. ‘The Australians are the only people of European stock in the whole world, who, living in a torrid climate, have resolutely refused to batten on coolie labour … to bar the way to the Asians was to reject the pleasures of a parasitic existence’. Nor do Menzies or Playford exist: ‘This is the country of Labour power.’ The lifesavers at Bondi are compared to Spartans exercising, and, surprisingly, are said to be fond of dragging people from the surf when no danger threatens and pummelling them on the beach.

Now we get to art. MacInnes, who doesn’t know the relative changes in the price of pictures and the basic wage since 1939 (100% against 450%) thinks Australia a paradise of patronage, illustrating this with Governor Macquarie, who ‘bestowed upon his favourite painter, Richard Read, the sinecure post of coroner’. This munificence, ‘in the grand European manner’, keeps on in the State galleries. Their directors, with the exception of Mr. Westbrook, will be amazed and charmed to learn that they all preside over ‘masterpieces which are the envy even of venerable European galleries’.

MacInnes deals with Ned Kelly in a fine B.O.P. style (‘they shot at his legs and bowled him over’), observing that Kelly’s Jerilderie letter is ‘a key document in Australian literary history’ (!).

We get a brief rundown on the history of Australian art, which ignores the significance of the early convict painters, skids over Martens and Buvelot, dismisses the work of Streeton and Roberts as ‘aesthetically sub-Millet’; after a superficial paragraph on aboriginal art (‘the naturalistic pictures are done for pure enjoyment, or for the instruction of children’) we run into Nolan.

Now MacInnes’ essay is called The Search for an Australian Myth in Painting. This, to others, would presuppose at least a brief study of Nolan’s contemporaries and what contributions they made to form this myth – for Nolan didn’t operate single handedly. But MacInnes is not writing art history; he is peddling a myth about a myth, with whose inner compulsions and historical situation he has next to no contact at all. Thus the complex strands of the near-symbiotic relationship between Melbourne avant-garde painters of the early forties under John Reed is not even mentioned, let alone discussed. And no analysis really takes place – only vague speculation of the ‘Might-it-not-be­that—?’ kind, varying between far­fetched possibility and the most involuted nonsense. Unhappily, MacInnes suffers from the illusion, revealed earlier in his Encounter essay, that Australian culture must needs be defined from the banks of the Thames.

Both Sir Kenneth Clark and Bryan Robertson do Nolan far more justice. Sir Kenneth’s introduction does not wholly avoid the London typecasting of an Australian image, but he writes – as ever – gracefully, lucidly, and very much to the point. His parallel between Nolan and Benjamin Britten, comparing their rapid assimilation of a wide variety of sources, their way of transcending local implications, their outsider heroes, is most illuminating. Bryan Robertson’s biography is more than a biography: it is sustained and deft criticism, indicating the areas of integration between Nolan’s stimuli, working methods, personality and vision. What these two men have to say about Nolan counteracts, to some extent, the very unfavourable impression the rest of the book gives.

Nolan is deceptively easy to ‘knock’. That is one of the penalties of being the one Australian artist to have successfully captured, consistently, the imagination of England. So daggers gleam in the dark when his head nods. But one should not let the Thames and Hudson book, which bears so little close examination, blind one to Nolan’s very substantial achievement. He is the best painter this country has yet produced; and during the decade from 1941 on, he did more to make articulate the image and metaphysical contours of Australia than anyone else. His present paintings are now reaping him the reputation his earlier ones earned, and this involves him in a perilous course along the tightrope of fashion; as soon as people ask, ‘What will Sid do next?’ it is time to watch out. Only one painter in this century has managed to épater les bourgeois consistently and keep his vision as pure and dynamic as before: Picasso. Nolan’s danger is his adaptability: he can do it. But not for long, and not very well either. The rolling penny has begun to wobble a bit.

 

 

Richard Holbrooke was a United States diplomat whose career began during the Vietnam War and ended during the one in Afghanistan, and whose life, according to George Packer, spanned the ‘American century’. He was an Assistant Secretary of State in the Carter and Clinton administrations, and President Obama’s Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan until his sudden death in 2010. For his role in brokering the Dayton Accords in 1995, he was thought by some (not least himself) to have earned the Nobel Peace Prize. He wasn’t awarded it, nor did he achieve his aim of becoming Secretary of State; his was a life that his biographer describes as ‘almost great’.

Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the end of the American century is told through a distinctive narrative voice, not Packer exactly, but a witness to Holbrooke’s story who editorialises freely in the first person. Alternately confiding and grandiloquent, Packer speaks in arresting sentences of a kind one doesn’t usually encounter in biographies of statesmen and diplomats. I happened to read this one on the Fourth of July: ‘We prefer our wars quick and decisive, concluding with a surrender ceremony, and we like firepower more than we want to admit.’ As the Afghanistan War lurched towards its eighteenth year and tanks took up their positions in Washington, D.C., for President Trump’s military parade, I thought, have Americans ever been shy about liking firepower?

These moments remind the reader that the narrator’s ‘we’, like the title’s ‘our’, is doing a great deal of work, and that America as seen by liberals differs from America as seen by conservatives, and both differ enormously from America as seen by non-Americans. Who are the ‘we’ for whom Holbrooke was ‘our man’? Not the Trump supporters for whom this lifelong habitué of Washington and Wall Street would be an archetypal denizen of ‘the swamp’. And not the seemingly resurgent American left, for whom he would emblematise decades of failed US policies. Holbrooke was ‘our man’ for an élite of policymakers and businesspeople who, despite myriad internal spats (exhaustively chronicled here), stayed remarkably unified around a determination for the United States to actively intervene in the affairs of other nations, but whose influence appears to be waning in the present: hence, ‘the end of the American century’. The overlap between this group and the upper reaches of the US media, including prominent magazine writers like Packer, is considerable (Holbrooke himself dated Diane Sawyer during her ascent to evening news stardom).

Holbrooke’s entry into this world combines merit, ambition, and chance. Not himself born to power and privilege, Holbrooke happened to go to high school with the son of the future Secretary of State in the Kennedy administration, Dean Rusk, who encouraged him, once he had an Ivy League degree in hand, to join the foreign service. This took him to Vietnam and face to face with ‘America’s first losing war’. Once back in Washington, he assiduously cultivated relationships with the grandees of the foreign policy establishment, above all W. Averell Harriman, who held a panoply of important diplomatic and governmental offices, but whose power was greater than the sum of his posts. Before entering government, Harriman used his vast inherited fortune to help establish the banking firm Brown Brothers Harriman; among the other founding partners were his Truman Administration cabinet colleague Robert A. Lovett (Harriman was Secretary of Commerce, Lovett was Secretary of Defence) and Prescott Bush, future senator and father and grandfather of the Presidents Bush. When the defeat of the Carter administration ended his tenure at the State Department, Holbrooke emulated this earlier generation of statesmen by embarking on a desultory-seeming twelve years at Lehman Brothers; later he would earn millions of dollars using his networks to ‘open doors’ for Credit Suisse.

One of the remarkable things about this book is how unexceptional all this seems to Packer (and his narrator): their energy is absorbed by the spectacle of Holbrooke’s ascent and by the obstacles he placed in his own path through his monumental ambition, underhandedness, and self-absorption. But a non-American reader is moved to ask: is it normal for a nation’s foreign policy élite to be so coextensive with its financial élite? Is it desirable? Could the recurrent failure of US foreign policy to live up to its stated ideals have something to do with simultaneously pursuing a version of the national interest defined in dollar terms?

Not so for Packer: throughout, he imputes a liberal idealism to Holbrooke that is only partly exemplified by his actual behaviour (which included praising Indonesian President Suharto for his human rights record during the occupation of East Timor, and advising John Kerry to support the invasion of Iraq for the sake of his presidential ambitions). The conceit of this book is that, just as the ugly side of Holbrooke’s personality was as much the precondition for his achievements as his idealism, so have America’s naïveté (Packer uses Graham Greene’s term, ‘innocence’) and vaulting ambition produced both triumphs, like the Marshall Plan and the peace at Dayton, and catastrophes like the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. In this new era of Trumpian isolationism, Packer concludes by asking a reader who, he concedes, will already know ‘every failing’ of America in the world: ‘don’t you, too, feel some regret?’

Maybe. But perhaps the end of the American century provides an opportunity for a more thoroughgoing reassessment than the one offered here, along lines suggested by the book’s title. It is peculiar to invoke the shade of Greene with a title like ‘Our Man’, only to dispel it the way Packer does when he comes to discuss The Quiet American (which Holbrooke had read before going to Vietnam):

My god, Greene loathed Americans. Our bathrooms were air-conditioned and our women deodorized and we were too shallow to know good and evil. It was a left-wing Catholic’s version of the usual British upper-class snobbery … But I have to admit Greene was onto something in Vietnam. The intensity of his animus made him clairvoyant.

It wasn’t Greene’s putative loathing of Americans that make him clairvoyant; like Joseph Conrad and George Orwell, he had a long acquaintance with empire and the way that it encourages its practitioners to sublimate self-interest into lofty principle. The essence of American innocence, according to Greene, was a lack of the sense of irony that could catch that sublimation in the act, a trait that Holbrooke seemed to share. One has the sense throughout of Holbrooke’s indomitable voice talking over any critic; yet, the achievement of Packer’s prose is such that it still feels like a voice worth hearing and arguing with.

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The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious – and, in another irony, further evokes the pathos, and hopelessness, of wanting to believe. In the title poem, which appears in the uncollected section, ‘Metropolitan Poems and other poems’, a ‘near-believer’ is defined by the poem’s priest speaker as ‘that kind of atheist I guess who prays at times’. This formula captures the ambiguity of the book’s many speakers and their addresses.

A highlight of this section of new poems is ‘They Came to Moorabbin’, about Nance Conway, a diplomat’s widow, who repeatedly refers to post-World War II Moorabbin as Mars, and her relationship with married couple Iris and Keith. The play of voice in this poem is as complicated (or rich) as in Pride and Prejudice. For example, ‘That something / also saying Please never lay a hand on me …’ is a paraphrase by the poem’s speaker of ‘something’ that is not exactly spoken, nor thought, by Nance. Later in the poem:

         ‘Possibly,’ Nance muttered back to Keith,

Keith speaking for his Iris.

                           Possibly?

He lets her say it since, except when Iris contradicts,

Keith rather likes an opinionated woman,

each brings out a similar boorish edginess.

It is not just Wearne’s use of free indirect discourse that is interesting, but (and Jane Austen also does this) the pressures he puts on voicing as an act – with original affects like ‘boorish edginess’ thrown in.