When I taught African American history at the University of Sydney, students read the words of Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, and Martin Luther King Jr. They discussed the relative merits of each leader’s strategies. In every class – mostly white students, including some migrants and children of migrants – a majority favoured Washington over the three more militant alternatives. Washington, ‘The Wizard of Tuskegee’, built an important college for black students in Alabama in the late nineteenth century and advocated for social change at levels as high as the White House. But the price he paid to do so was to make frequent claims that the best means of change was a gradual one, in which African Americans would prove their worth as citizens by being great workers and patriots. (He meanwhile secretly funded civil rights legal suits.) Washington’s strategy was never able to counter racism’s logic-defying mercurial power, nor overcome the fact that white people are not always good people. To my students this news often came as a shock.

My students’ fantasy is shared by many fans of one of the signal texts of modern American writing and filmmaking, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. The 1960 book and 1962 film were and remain incredibly popular. Told through the eyes of ‘tomboy’ Jean Louise ‘Scout’ Finch (mediated in the book by adult Jean Louise), both novel and movie appealed with their vision of small-town Southern innocence and fundamental goodness, embodied in the children and most memorably in Scout’s father, lawyer Atticus Finch. Famously, Harper Lee gave her last substantial interview in 1964 and hardly published another word. In 2015, with Lee possibly suffering dementia, a decision was taken to publish Go Set a Watchman, written in 1957 before Mockingbird and stashed for decades in a deposit box in Lee’s hometown bank. Set in the 1950s, twenty years after the action of Mockingbird, Watchman has many of the same characters, including Jean Louise and Atticus, and explores many of the same themes. Rather than charming, it is didactic and tedious. The books taken together, though, are fascinating.

When Vance Palmer met Nettie Higgins in the summer of 1909 in the sedate setting of the State Library of Victoria, they were both twenty-three years old. Yet even to speak to one another was a breach of convention; they had not been introduced, and Nettie at least felt quite daring. An arts student at Melbourne University, she had never been far from her parents’ house. Vance had made the break with home and travelled the world: he had worked as a teacher and a freelance journalist, and nourished hopes of becoming a full-time writer.

The correspondence that followed, after Vance returned to his home state of Queensland, began cautiously. Miss Higgins wrote to Mr Palmer, and signed off with ‘Yours sincerely’. He replied in the same correct form. They wrote about books and ideas, about his ambitions and her hesitations. Their contrasting personalities emerged. Vance was a loner, accustomed to making his own choices, but longing for a listener. Nettie was struggling for independence from kindly, controlling parents and a constricting social world. She told Vance that she lived with ‘other people’s problems’, not her own. As the daughter at home, she had so little privacy that she had to ask Vance to address his letters to her at the University Women’s clubrooms. Otherwise, questions would be asked.

The cover image on Seymour Hersh’s memoir, Reporter, could hardly be improved. Taken in 1974 in the newsroom of The New York Times, it shows Hersh with his left elbow propped on a typewriter with blank paper in the roller, sleeves rolled up and patterned tie loose around an unironed collar. He is leaning confidentially in to the receiver of what must be a rotary dial phone, listening intently, gazing into the middle distance. It could be a still from All the President’s Men or The Parallax View, although Hersh is in black and white, as befits a giant of print, bane of governments and scourge of spies from Watergate to Abu Ghraib.

The latest publication by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, a prolific author since leaving federal politics in 2013, is a political memoir that defies the norms of this often-predictable genre. Largely abandoning chronological narrative, Carr offers a disjointed sequence of nearly fifty short chapters that sing, in his own description, like jazz-inspired improvisations. These fragments – confessions, hypotheticals, diary excerpts, correspondence, flashbacks, and a curious ‘flash forward’ to 2050 when he will be aged 102, make for a stylistically unusual and readable combination.

‘Fling the whole thing in the air and see where it lands,’ he warns us at the outset. It works, mostly. But I suspect that writing this memoir involved less carefree improvising and more careful curating. Offered a glimpse of the private individual behind the public figure, we find a droll, smart, energetic, highly ambitious policy wonk – no surprises there. He inherited and, as premier from 1995 to 2005, came to embody the determinedly centrist traditions of the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party, and now as memoirist he is their defender and enforcer. More unexpectedly, we discover in these pithy reconstructions a genuinely reflective personality, aware of the limits and constraints of Labor leadership as well as of its possibilities, and ready to offer corrective advice to his own former self as well as to future party leaders in opposition and in government.

When the bloated and pocky corpse of literary studies is finally thrown from the battlements of the ivory tower in a futile attempt to appease the unappeasable forces of neoliberal corporatism, the thoughts of the incorrigible few who thought it was a worthwhile intellectual pursuit will naturally turn to the question of what went wrong. I trust when the time comes ⎯ sooner rather than later, one suspects ⎯ due consideration will be given to the remarkable ability of academics to write about literature in ways so fantastically tedious that the mind of the unfortunate reader is not merely inclined to wander, but to flee out of a natural instinct for self-preservation.

Exhibit A: Sarah Kennedy’s T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination. Kennedy is not the kind of critic who delights in being wilfully abstruse; she does not arm herself with the rebarbative jargon and fuck-you syntax so many literary theorists have used to conceal their ideas and to repel the potential menace of a readership that extends into double figures. Her approach is more conventional and, in some respects, more fiendish: she writes prose so dry you need eye-drops to read it. Her book is rendered entirely in sentences like this one: ‘Over the course of the preceding three chapters, I have tried to show that Eliot’s most deeply embedded and powerfully recursive metaphoric language ⎯ as well as various key self-analytical terms in his critical idiom ⎯ are drawn from and operate within an imaginative structure that amounts to a Shakespearean gestalt.’

On the face of it, there might seem to be nothing inherently wrong with this kind of bland but functional sentence, beyond the fact that you get about halfway through and realise you don’t really care how it ends. But the cumulative effect of two-hundred-odd pages of such scrupulously affectless pronouncements is stupefaction.

Other than the unspoken academic convention that (falsely) equates starchiness with intellectual seriousness, there is no particular reason why a robotic tone should be deemed necessary, or even appropriate, when one is examining the poetics of a writer as complicated, influential, and downright strange as Eliot. He was a weird dude with some weird opinions, about which he could be by turns dogmatic and cagey. As the doyen of high-modernist poetry, he styled himself as an enemy of Romanticism, scorning poets whose verses were mere effusions of ‘personality’, dismissing the flaky notion of inspiration as the legacy of an outdated, nineteenth-century sensibility. His declared allegiance was to Classicism and the ideal of poetic impersonality he encapsulated in his famous concept of the ‘objective correlative’.

He was also a prominent example of that paradoxical figure who haunts the literature of the early-twentieth century: the anti-modern modernist. He was at once avant-garde and reactionary, a writer whose commitment to cutting-edge poetics was informed by his despair at the modern world’s loss of meaning and coherence. He liked to contrast the supposed order of the Middle Ages with the fragmentation and chaos of his own time, a time said to be suffering from a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that (for reasons he never adequately explained) had occurred sometime around the seventeenth century and had alienated thought from feeling. The convergence of his aesthetic ideas with his religious and political convictions was often implied in his literary judgements. He affected to prefer Dante to Shakespeare, declaring a work no less than Hamlet to be an artistic failure. He praised Joyce for imposing a mythical order on the disorder of modernity and admired Baudelaire for recognising the reality of evil and the inadequacy of the Romantic lyric as an expressive form.

Image of T.S. Eliot. (credit: Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "T. S. Eliot" The New York Public Library Digital Collections.)It is invariably the case with Eliot that the closer one looks, the more complicated the picture becomes. And this is where Kennedy’s monograph has an interesting argument to make. T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination examines, in minute detail, Eliot’s ideas about creativity. It is organised around metaphors and images recurring throughout his work, which Kennedy divides into three broad categories. The first section of the book considers elemental metaphors, particularly Eliot’s fascination with sea imagery, which Kennedy associates with the influence of Shakespeare’s late plays, most notably The Tempest. The second section looks at Eliot’s views of time and space, and the poetic use he made of the emerging scientific insights of his day. The final third of the book turns to motifs of ‘gestation, introspection, descent and resurrection … self-doublings, doppelgängers, hollow men, and the alter egos, animas, and shadows of twentieth-century psychology’. Kennedy’s careful dissection of these themes leads her to conclude that, over the course of his career, ‘Eliot gradually revealed a concept of poetic creation with surprising affinities to what we can call by way of shorthand “Romantic Imagination”, both as expressed by Coleridge and Keats and as filtered through later movements in literature and psychology.’

Image of Sarah Kennedy (photo by Downing College Cambridge)This complicating view of Eliot is not without precedent. His contemporary Lionel Trilling once teasingly suggested that Eliot was perhaps more of a Romantic than he cared to admit. In her afterword, Kennedy cites a 1962 essay by Randall Jarrell, in which he imagines the exasperation of future critics when they consider the credulity with which Eliot’s pronouncements about impersonality were first received: ‘Surely you must have seen that he was one of the most subjective and daemonic poets who ever lived, the victim and helpless beneficiary of his own inexorable compulsions, obsessions?’

The observation might be read as having an inadvertently reflexive quality. Kennedy is a knowledgeable and attentive reader. The shortcomings of T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination are largely matters of tone and style. Its stuffy air of scholarly objectivity manifests itself in a general tendency to become bogged down in detail and (despite Kennedy’s stated intention) to dive down the many rabbit holes presented by Eliot’s manifold allusions ⎯ all of which work against the clear articulation of her central thesis. Yet Kennedy has presumably chosen to write in such detail and at such length about Eliot’s poetics because, on some level, she feels an affinity with his poetry. His work must interest her, draw from her some kind of subjective response, involve her in some compelling way, arouse in her a desire to think and feel and respond on a personal level. Imagine how much more dynamic her writing would be if she allowed herself to express even a little of that interest.

Jolley Prize

Despite afoul August weather, a large audience filled fortyfivedownstairs in Melbourne on August 20 for the annual ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize ceremony. Novelist Patrick Allington – chair of the judging panel – spoke after the readings from our three shortlisted authors, and commented that the Jolley entries showed that ‘short story writers are busy responding to these challenging political times – whether it’s at the local level (where “local” is for an individual writer), the national level (however interpreted), or the global level.’

Madeleine Lucas was named the overall winner for her story ‘Ruins’. She received $7,000. The judges commented: ‘Sensual, tactile and full of quiet fire, “Ruins” is a story bold and assured enough to take the questions that lurk in literature’s heart – questions of love, desire and choice – and ask them outright. As a mother and her newly adult daughter drive out to a ruined lighthouse, they slip back into old roles, but carry new secrets. Richly anchored in place, and alive to Australian history, this story speaks strongly to how women learn to inhabit themselves and the world. Timely and gorgeously evocative.’

Claire Aman, who received third place in the Jolley Prize, reading her story 'Vasco'.

Madelaine Lucas, who received $7,000, commented: ‘I am overjoyed to win this year’s ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. My very first publication came from a magazine contest, so I know firsthand the opportunities they provide to new writers. I am incredibly grateful to the ABR and judges for choosing my story and helping me to connect with Australian readers.’

Sharmini Aphrodite (Singapore) – at twenty-two the youngest person yet shortlisted for the Jolley Prize – receives $2,000 for her story ‘Between the Mountain and the Sea’, which the judges described as ‘bibliophilic, notational, fragmentary, lush and quivering in its density. There is an archival and luminous texture to the story as it bleeds into the torn edges of culture, class and history, the narrator hovering, like a witness in the transient foreground, where the gaps coalesce.’

Claire Aman (NSW), placed third, receives $1,000 for ‘Vasco’, of which the judges said: ‘a mapmaking narrator commemorates a deep bond with her now-departed neighbour. In achingly poetic and at times claustrophobic prose, the narrator looks within herself to offer a rich but exposing portrait of a contained world view.’

All three shortlisted stories appear in the August Fiction issue, which can be purchased online.

Calibre Essay Prize

J.M. Coetzee is a judge of the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize (Photo by Bert Nienhaus)For the thirteenth time, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished non-fiction essay. The Prize is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner receives $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. Both essays will appear in ABR. Once again, Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. The judges on this occasion are J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose.

Reflecting the plastic nature of the form, we welcome all kinds of essays – from the literary and the political to the experimental and highly personal.

Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries will close on 14 January 2019. The two winners will be named in our April 2019 issue.

All previous Calibre-winning essays are available online.

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

Michelle de Kretser wins Miles Franklin Award

Michelle de Kretser (Photo via Allen & Unwin)

Congratulations to Michelle de Kretser for winning the Miles Franklin Literary Award this year for her novel The Life To Come. It is the second time Australia’s most prestigious literary prize has been awarded to de Kretser, making her the third woman to win the $60,000 award more than once after Thea Astley and Jessica Anderson. ABR attended the announcement ceremony at Deakin Edge on Sunday, and witnessed Michelle speak powerfully about Australia’s treatment of asylum speakers while accepted her award, just as she did in her excoriating speech in 2013 when she received the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Questions of Travel (which also won the Miles).

Michelle made a point of naming those who have died on Manus Island and Nauru – those who are officially reduced to an identification number. Beejay Silcox, reviewing ‘The Life to Come’ for ABR in October 2017, wrote: ‘De Kretser’s vision of Australia will be easy to recognise, but hard to own. She presses on points of national tenderness, and they smart. Here is a country suspicious and resentful of its own success, and prone to delusions of victimhood.’

Speaking of her win, de Kretser said, ‘I feel twice as lucky, twice as happy, and twice as honoured.’ The Life To Come was selected from a formidable shortlist, including: Felicity Castagna’s No More Boats, Eva Hornung’s The Last Garden, Catherine McKinnon’s Storyland, Gerald Murnane’s Border Districts and Kim Scott’s Taboo. Chair of the 2018 judging panel, Richard Neville, said of the The Life to Come: ‘Sentence-by-sentence, it is elegant, full of life and funny. With her characteristic wit and style, Michelle de Kretser dissects the way Australians see ourselves, and reflects on the ways other parts of the world see us.’

PEN in WA

A group of prominent Perth writers have formed a Perth Centre of PEN International, to work with existing centres in Sydney and Melbourne. PEN works for responsible freedom of expression. Perth PEN is based at the Centre for Stories in Northbridge and has an active program of events, including a reading of works by imprisoned writers on August 23 and a panel in partnership with AmnestyWA in October.

Details of events and membership are available at www.perthpen.org

Book of the Week

Book of the Week – our new online feature – appears each Monday: a review of a major new publication. This feature can be read freely for one week, and will then appear in the following print edition.

Mao’s Last Dancer Li Cunxin brings A Midsummer Night's Dream to Melbourne

A promotional image of Queensland Ballet's A Midsummer Night's Dream (photo by Queensland Ballet)

Chinese-Australian ballet star Li Cunxin, known internationally from his bestselling memoir Mao’s Last Dancer, is bringing the Queensland Ballet production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Melbourne this October. Li Cunxin, now a world-famous ballet dancer, has been Queensland Ballet's Artistic Director since July 2012. ‘We’re very proud to present this co-production,’ said Li Cunxin. ‘I’m thrilled to bring Queensland Ballet back to what was my first home in Australia.’

The production will be choreographed by Liam Scarlett, who is also producing a new production of Swan Lake for The Royal Ballet – having been appointed their first Artist’s Residence in 2012. Following Melbourne, Queensland Ballet will then take it’s show to Shanghai, Beijing, Xi’an and Suzhou. It will be a momentous return to his roots for Cunxin, who began his career in ballet at the young age of eleven when selected by Madame Mao’s cultural advisors to attend the Beijing Dance Academy.

For more information, visit the Queensland Ballet website.

Reader survey

We thank all those who completed our online reader survey – almost 500 readers in all. We were heartened by the overall tenor of your comments on the magazine, but we also noted your suggestions and criticisms. These will help us to continue reshaping the magazine.

We’re always curious to find out what people think about our coverage of Australian books vis-à-vis those published overseas. Seventeen per cent of respondents favoured more overseas titles; sixteen per cent favoured fewer – sixty-seven per cent preferred the status quo. (These percentages have hardly changed since our first reader survey back in 2006.)

As always, we invited readers to nominate their favourite book reviewers and arts critics. Names that came up again and again were Geordie Williamson, Morag Fraser, Robert Dessaix, and Brenda Niall – but the clear favourite, on this occasion, was Beejay Silcox, the ABR Fortieth Birthday Fellow, who has made such an impression in the magazine (and elsewhere) since she began contributing in 2016.

When John Norman Wheatley met Nina Watkin in Germany in 1946, he would have regarded her as a lesser being on all fronts: woman to his man, forty to his forty-eight, Australian to his English, nurse to his doctor. They met as fellow employees of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), working with wartime refugees from an assortment of European countries. In this heartbreaking memoir of her mother Nina, or ‘Neen’, Nadia Wheatley writes:

UNRRA is another of the magic words of my childhood, words that set my mother apart from the mothers who pick up my classmates after school, the mothers who play tennis, and  have short permed hair, and seem to have had no life before their children were born … the word ‘UNRRA’ turns on a light inside Neen, a light  that shines in her eyes.

There’s the Bunny
Flashin his Bunny.

In 1916, the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death coincided with the first anniversary of the Gallipoli landings, thus providing the impetus for this absorbing study of memory and forgetting, and what the authors call a specifically ‘antipodal’ dynamic of asymmetrical commemorations across the northern and southern hemispheres. The Shakespeare Tercentenary, they note, ‘lies at the cusp … of the imperial and the post-imperial’, and the antipodal reading they offer steers a middle course between the ideas of ‘global’ and ‘local’ Shakespeares by focusing on distinct but ‘antipodally connected’ parts of the world. Their focal cities – London, Sydney, Auckland, and Dunedin – have a ‘sustained socio-historical relationship across the hemispheres’, which causes them to function in a manner characterised by ‘resistance-yet-interdependence’. It is not simply ‘antipodean’ – this isn’t a study of Shakespeare in Australia or New Zealand – it is ‘antipodal’: ‘By “antipodal reading”, then, we mean an analysis of certain activities, events or performances taking place at the same moment in ostensibly equal and opposite locations across the globe, locations that are in fact – due to the effects of history, in particular imperial history – not equal at all, culturally and politically.’

The story the authors tell is of the emergence of global Shakespeare from the shadow of imperial Shakespeare, and of the continued relationship between former coloniser and former colonies that is captured in these memorialising processes.

The book is co-authored but consists of elegantly interlinked chapters that are individually attributed. McMullan begins his ‘case study in the selective rememberings and the forgettings that constitute the processes of memorialization’ with the forgotten role played by Israel Gollancz in the founding of the National Theatre, and his legacy in influencing the Royal Shakespeare Company and the present-day Globe Theatre in London. Plans for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre faced challenges in terms of acquiring funding, appropriate land, and even consensus (William Poel had proposed a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe as early as 1897; others preferred a more modern theatre). The interruption of the war did little to help, and much of this book focuses on the competing demands of patriotism: honouring the country’s greatest writer and, of more immediately pressing concern, honouring its fallen soldiers. Gollancz orchestrated the 1916 Tercentenary activities in England through his roles on multiple committees and his editing of one of the few surviving artefacts of the commemoration activities, A Book of Homage to Shakespeare. For this, he invited 166 contributors, writing in a wide range of languages, to celebrate the idea of ‘Shakespeare’ – what McMullan dubs a kind of ‘performative memorial’. Through this ‘consciously global reach’, Gollancz did much to advance the case for Shakespeare ‘as a figure of a global culture not restricted to Empire’.

Sydney’s Shakespeare Monument near the State Library is explored as ‘the defining gesture of Sydney Tercentenary commemoration’ by Philip Mead, who notes that the statue was not the product of democratic discussion but rather ‘a very privatized version of Shakespeare remembrance’. Focusing on Shakespeare the man, rather than his works, is a commemorative act ‘driven by an imperial ideology of Englishness’, and was the brainchild primarily of NSW Shakespeare Society President Henry Gullett, whose personal wealth posthumously facilitated the installation of the statue near the Library. By then, it was already ‘an old-fashioned gesture of commemoration’ and starkly at odds with what was happening in England.

Another key contribution made by Gollancz is subsequently taken up by Ailsa Grant Ferguson. Recognising the need to maintain momentum despite the inability to progress the fundraising plans for a Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre during wartime, Gollancz brokered a solution: the acquisition of a site in Bloomsbury where the YMCA could create accommodation for Anzac soldiers in a series of temporary buildings known as the ‘Shakespeare Hut’. There, in addition to accommodation and meals, troops could take in various Shakespearean A portrait of William Shakespeare. (Wiki Commons)entertainments (by leading actors of the day) on the modest but central stage – at least, it was hoped, until a more permanent memorial theatre to Shakespeare could be built on the site. The Hut was ‘an improvisation solely for wartime’ but, importantly, solicited Shakespeare’s name in support of wartime efforts, and from 1919 until its demolition in 1923 the Hut was leased to the Indian YMCA and the proceeds used to fund the Stratford-based New Shakespeare Company (a precursor to the Royal Shakespeare Company). Meanwhile, the fundraising campaign for a more permanent theatre included a ‘Shakespeare’s England’ exhibition which featured Poel’s Globe replica design; a design later seen by the young Sam Wanamaker at the Chicago World Fair in 1934 in what was evidently a formative moment for the man responsible for creating the present Globe Theatre in London. Until now, the Hut has been only cursorily examined and dismissed as providing amateur entertainment for British troops (a factually inaccurate statement in multiple ways).

Proffesor Gordon McMullan (Photo by Bronac McNeill)Mark Houlahan turns to newspapers and ephemera to document New Zealand’s response to the Tercentenary. He looks at William Pember Reeves’s contribution to Gollancz’s Homage book and offers a coda on the 2016 commemorations in the form of Auckland’s Pop-Up Globe as unintentional analogue to the temporary Shakespeare Hut. Kate Flaherty turns to the stage history of Henry V to suggest that ‘“Shakespeare” was read in Australia as representing English racial pedigree and solidarity with Empire’. Her analysis of Bell Shakespeare productions of the Henry plays in 1998–99 and 2013–14 shows how, for the first time, ‘the alliance between Shakespeare and war commemoration is staged as deeply troubled’. Together, these chapters rethink the process of remembering and forgetting through a provocative antipodal lens.

One day not that far away, I suspect, hot-metal memoirs will grow cold on the slab. Thus the triumph of technology over the nostalgia of those days when journalistic skills included not only being up to shorthand speed but being able to read upside down and back to front. The latter skill was necessary for any production journalist who spent long and awkward hours in the composing room, standing across a metal forme from a nimble compositor who arranged the layout of various columns of lead type and photogravure blocks into an immovable mass to be cast into a newspaper page. Trying even to explain a composing room – or, to give its affectionate nickname, ‘the stone’ – to anyone born at the start of this century (perhaps before), is a thankless and indeed useless task. There is an entire archaic lexicon of once-familiar newspaper production terms: define ‘flong’, ‘galley’, ‘WOB’, ‘chase’, ‘slug’, ‘widow and orphan’, and ‘banging-out’ (answers below).

One person who is no doubt still familiar with all of the above words is Les Hinton, whose long and labyrinthine path through daily journalism has taken him, figuratively speaking, from the stygian underworld of black ink to the rarefied heights of boardroom politics, becoming a trusted counsel of Rupert , and running various blocks of his media empire in the United States and Britain.

Dunera Lives: A visual history is a compelling examination of the experiences of Britain’s enemy aliens within Australia’s detention centres in World War II. This evocative visual narrative of primary sources, compiled by the late Ken Inglis with Seumas Spark and Jay Winter, assisted by Carol Bunyan, brings these fraught years to life. Dunera Lives is both a serious historical study and a means to dip into twentieth-century history.

The work includes drawings, paintings, cartoons, and official documents, some of which have not been made public before. This is the art of the tortured and the literature of the exiled; personal stories of deportation and internment. The images, ranging from humorous to anguished, are testaments to help us understand the past and reflect on the present. Robert Loewenstein’s painted map of Australia as an island bordered not by water but by barbed wire is particularly jarring, an image that in 2018 could come from Manus Island or Nauru.

Unusual for a federal parliamentarian, Andrew Leigh is a former academic economist and author of several serious books, these being distinguished from the vapid and self-serving memoirs published in recent times by many current and former politicians.

Leigh’s latest book, Randomistas, is an argument for the utility of randomised tests as one of the most valuable means of obtaining evidence on which to base effective public policy programs. Such tests are, of course, used extensively in marketing products by the private sector, and the book spends some time on these kinds of exercises. But its chief concern is to explain how these tests can improve the delivery of services by governments in developed and undeveloped countries.

Necessary Evil: How to fix finance by saving human rights, by David Kinley, a law professor at the University of Sydney, originates in the conclusion of his 2008 book looking at the social trade-offs of what he termed Civilising Globalisation. Kinley’s new book attempts to reconcile finance and human rights as a two-way process. Throughout the text, Kinley indeed betrays a somewhat reluctant respect and admiration for the complex functions exerted by finance in modern societies, yet he denounces the financial narcissism and exceptionalism perverting the contemporary human rights discourse. Kinley’s premise is that finance is a vital utility intended to serve society, not subvert it, especially considering that finance has such an extraordinary impact on ordinary lives. Kinley argues that finance’s redeeming features lie in the field of human rights, so much so that he metaphorically summarises his book as ‘the story of a relationship between two strange bedfellows intent to bear responsible economic stewardship through modern society’s heightened levels of rationality’.

This all makes eminent sense. However, the book’s core argument rests on vague philosophical grounds of social attitude, empathy, and capacity for change. What is missing throughout is a tighter analytical consideration of perspectives and proposals capable of significant paradigm shifts in the regulation of finance and human rights, such as those emerging in politics from alternative-right and radical-left circles,  as well as in economics from unorthodox technicians. For instance, more could have been said about the intriguing critique of fractional reserve banking, which has been widely discussed by economists since the 2008 global financial crisis, and has recently elicited a (defeated) Swiss referendum (the so-called Vollgeld, or sovereign money), even garnering the support of Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator of the Financial Times.

During World War II, thousands of Indonesians arrived in Australia, brought by the colonial Dutch as they fled Japan’s military advance through Southeast Asia, and Molly Warner wanted to get to know them. She and other Australians established an association that sought ‘[t]o promote cultural relations with Asia … educate Australia about Asia and Asia about Australia, [and] improve the woeful isolationism of so many Australians’. Warner would live those principles, soon moving to Indonesia to work for its anti-colonial revolution; she spent the rest of her life there. This edited collection contains many accounts of similar exchanges − of people, perspectives, capital, and knowledge moving between Indonesia and Australia with rich results. Yet broadly, the Australia–Indonesia relationship remains thin and laced with mutual suspicion.

The neighbours’ differences are plain: one is Western, one majority Muslim, one economically developed, the other developing. Two decades ago, Paul Keating spoke of the ‘web’ of Australian foreign relations being incomplete without comprehensive Indonesia ties. Several Australian ‘Indonesianist’ scholars had similarly been arguing for the benefits of substantial links. Yet those ambitious visions have recently been challenged. Former DFAT official Ken Ward, in a much-discussed Lowy Institute paper, Condemned to Crisis? (2015), argued the relationship will inevitably be fractious and distant, and should simply be managed.

Ryan O'Neill (photograph by Peter Marko)Why do you write?

I write because at the moment no one else is writing the kinds of books I want to read, and so I have to write them. Of course, by the time I have written them I never want to look at them again.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. But this is the exception. Most often I don’t remember my dreams, and when I do they are nothing like the symbolic and character-defining visions experienced by characters in novels, but simply disjointed nonsense.

Where are you happiest?

Having crossed the bustling Ponte Vecchio in Florence, the visitor soon encounters a small piazza with a shaded entrance to the church of Santa Felicita and gladly enters the cool grey stone interior. On the right, behind an iron gate, a painting of Christ’s Deposition 1526–28 illuminates a side chapel, beaming colours of neon intensity, aqua blue, raspberry, and lime green. Christ’s body is transported by a host of intertwined figures, yearning and dolorous. In a bodysuit of fluorescent pink, a youth crouches underneath Christ’s legs, yet he seems to bear no weight other than that of grief. Mary and her attendants bid farewell to Christ in a mesmerising dance-like ritual.

‘Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can re-align chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.’

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion (1987)

In a cheerless London basement, a young man sifts through the bureaucratic detritus of World War II: ‘to unearth whatever evidence might still remain of actions that history might consider untoward’. The project is called ‘The Silent Correction’ – a furtive dimming of the national memory. Warlight, Michael Ondaatje’s effulgent new novel, is a story of half-lights and half-truths – a novel of matchlight, gaslight, limelight and moonlight, sodium light and storm light, bonfires and bomb-fires. A novel in chiaroscuro.

When I was twenty-seven, I visited mainland Scandinavia for the first time. I had spent the last of my travel money on a rail pass, and I was on a tight budget. One day, I thought I would save some money on accommodation by catching an overnight train from Stockholm to Trondheim. When I woke up the next morning, I disembarked and went for an aimless walk, but eventually I had to ask for directions. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the young woman I approached, ‘I don’t speak any Swedish.’ ‘That’s okay,’ she answered, ‘nor do I. This is Norway.’ Failing to realise that I had arrived in a new country may seem odd. But I had been asleep as we crossed the border, and although I was now looking at the Norwegian Sea and no longer the Baltic, both bodies of water reflected the early winter light just as brilliantly, and both towns seemed as perfectly Scandinavian: prosperous, calm, and pretty.

Robert Drewe’s first short story collection, the widely acclaimed The Bodysurfers (1983), opens with a story of the Lang family – children Annie, David, and Max, taken by their recently widowed father for a Christmas Day lunch at a local hotel, where it becomes apparent that their father is on intimate terms with the hotel manageress.

This lunch, the desultory aftermath with the children left waiting in the hotel carpark, is recalled in Drewe’s fourth and latest collection, The True Colour of the Sea. ‘Imaginary Islands’ sees David Lang, older now than his father was in the earlier story, remembering this sad lunch while he waits for his own children and grandchildren near the same beachside hotel on a Christmas Eve forty-nine years later. It is a wry, tender portrait of ageing, the one-time boy morphing into a version of his father through misjudged attempts at bonhomie, slowly becoming an anachronism while holding on to moments of tenderness and transcendence.

A short way into this intriguing novel, author Ruby J. Murray cites Virginia Woolf on the subject of biography. According to Murray’s protagonist, Woolf called it ‘a plodding art’: ‘Every life, she wrote, should open with a list of facts … a stately parade of the real. Births, deaths and marriages. Broken limbs, acquisitions, graduations, wars. Any interpretation of the facts, she said, is fiction. But the facts remain.’

In fact, what Virginia Woolf claims in chapter two of her fictional biography Orlando is: ‘the first duty of a biographer … is to plod, without looking to right or left, in the indelible footprints of truth; unenticed by flowers, regardless of shade; on and on methodically till we fall plump into the grave and write finis on the tombstone above our heads … Our simple duty is to state the facts and so let the reader make of them what he may.’

Nevertheless, the notion that Murray explores in her own fictional biography is one with which every biographer quickly becomes familiar: even the facts, selectively revealed and without interpretation, can create a fiction. And where Woolf was composing a wildly fictive biography based on the life of her lover, Vita Sackville-West, Murray has created a fictional biographer whose imaginary subject, Edna Cranmer, née Whitedale, is a neglected Australian artist, recently deceased.

Early The Biographer’s Lover, we learn that Murray’s unnamed wordsmith, an impoverished gun-for-hire, is wavering between several possibilities. Should she produce what she has been commissioned to write: a flattering monograph, or vanity publication, for a grieving family; or should she, at the urging of her chain-smoking literary agent, try to finagle it into a more commercially attractive, ghosted autobiography of Edna’s son, a well-known Geelong football player? Tugging her in a different direction altogether is the urge to write a ‘proper’ biography of the enigmatic Edna, to seek out her essence and tell the truth about her life and work. But why (as we the readers are led to ponder), do Edna’s daughter and son find this last prospect so threatening?

A biography, authorised or unauthorised, may range between uncovering a disturbing secret history or creating a comforting mythology. The latter, it seems, is certainly what the Cranmer family wants. Knowing this, we are further asked to consider: why might a biographer ultimately decide to be complicit in this?

Told in short segments that alternate between an account of the biographer’s own activities and autobiographical reflections, and her developing outline of Edna’s life and apparently failed career, the story moves forward in time at a steady but unsynchronised pace. ‘Edna’ was born in 1929; her biographer around 1962, and in their thirty years of coexistence in the same suburbs of Melbourne, their paths do not cross, although on occasion they veer very close to each other. Methodically, the researcher tracks her subject’s geographical movements and locales, including, crucially, a lost period in France. She also records her volatile relationship with her major sources: Edna’s surviving family members, all with their own secrets, agendas, and ambitions for the project.

A compounding layer of difficulty is added by the unnamed biographer gleaning her insights into Edna’s frame of mind almost entirely from her paintings: for various reasons pertaining to the plot, Edna’s letters are embargoed. Here the author has set herself one of a novelist’s more difficult tasks: with a fictional artist, we can have no imaginative reference to the painter’s creations in our mind’s eye, but Murray handles the problem skilfully enough, with sufficient command of art history and painting techniques to convey a convincing idea of how the these works might have looked.

Woven through the story is an evocative portrait of Melbourne’s peninsulas, specifically West Geelong and Sorrento: from Geelong comes an extended family of Whitedale battlers; from Sorrento, the Cranmer clan, grown prosperous from the proceeds of a carpet factory. Members of one have worked for the other: social tensions arise when a Whitedale daughter marries a Cranmer son. The arc of Edna’s life, as a caring wife and resolute painter, also carries us through some seminal but sometimes neglected moments in Australian history: the Women’s Land Army during World War II; the fate of female painters entering the Archibald Prize; the gendered selection of Australia’s war artists. Emblematic in the story is Ern Malley’s ‘black swan of trespass’, birds both real and symbolic.

Ruby J Murray (Photo via Black Inc.)Melbourne-born Ruby J. Murray was educated in Carlton and at several universities, including the Sorbonne, and has a background in political studies, freelance journalism for small magazines, and copywriting. Her first novel, Running Dogs (2012), set in Jakarta in 1997, was shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. Her publisher’s website reveals that she is a granddaughter of sculptor Guy Boyd, whose wider family has inspired its own nest of life stories, some contentious and contested, which may throw some light on Murray’s avenue into her theme. ‘The Biographer’s Lover is a novel about Australia’s complex relationship with memory,’ she tells us.

Murray’s writing is intelligent and expressive; after some occasionally awkward early scene-setting, the novel settles into its stride and becomes gripping, a page turner, as the slow reveal unfolds. At the end, a great number of complex threads are tied up neatly, if in a perhaps unlikely fashion, but in the meantime we have been taken on a highly enjoyable ride.

Stephanie Bishop’s third novel, Man Out of Time, her most mature work to date, echoes Virginia Woolf’s psychological realism and the claustrophobic intensity of Elizabeth Harrower’s The Watch Tower (1966). Indeed, an unkind reviewer might compare Bishop’s latest novel to a subtle iteration of domestic noir, where the great threat is the family unit and its overbearing figurehead, although the protagonist in Bishop’s world oscillates between wanting to escape her oppressor and feeling deeply wedded to him.

The ‘man out of time’ in Bishop’s story is Stella Gilman’s father, Leon, whose mental decline and sectioning in a psychiatric hospital not only limits his ability to function in the world, but has a catastrophic effect on his wife, Frances, and daughter, Stella. We learn of Leon’s battles with mental illness in a series of lengthy flashbacks that make up the majority of the novel, while the present-day narration focuses on Frances and Stella’s attempt to locate Leon, who has been missing for a fortnight.

'Longing,’ thinks Hazel West, the twenty-five-year-old protagonist of Susan Midalia’s first novel, ‘I could begin a story with longing.’ This is a book about various kinds of longing: the desire for intimacy, for human understanding, for self-possession and self-forgetting. Most of all, though, this is a book about language, about linguistic ‘shades of meaning’. Hazel is preoccupied with the fit of things with their referents. Ironically, she stumbles over her word choices in almost every encounter. ‘Words ha[ve] important shades of meaning,’ she says, ‘which [is] why you should never use a thesaurus.’

Suniti Namjoshi has made an international reputation as a fabulist and poet with a strong feminist bent. Some Australian readers will be familiar with her work, long published here by Spinifex. Another Australian connection: after leaving India, then Canada, Namjoshi settled in England with her Australian partner, the writer Gillian Hanscombe.

Being a fabulist is not a common occupation for present-day writers, even a touch anachronistic, but in Namjoshi’s hands the fable expands to encompass facets of modern life and is used to re-examine fundamental values and concepts. This is all done with the lightest of touches and a sly, whimsical sense of humour. Namjoshi has a voice like no other: playful, gently satirical, backed by a depth of knowledge of European literature, and enriched by myths and fables of many cultures.

 In Aesop the Fox, Aesop the man is elided with his well-known Fox fable. The conceit is that Namjoshi, longing to meet her famous predecessor, time travels to sixth-century-bce Greece to find out more about him. After all, he is as famous, in his way, she says, as Homer or Shakespeare. When Namjoshi turns up, Aesop and his young friend Androcles – of Androcles and the Lion fame – are slaves, owned by a nasty character who breaches his promise to free them. Instead, he sells them on to a much more humane master, Jadmon. In their new home, Androcles finds favour with his pleasing singing voice, and the master likes Aesop’s stories, and so asks him to tutor his children. It is not long before the slaves are given their freedom but choose to stay with this pleasant household.

During these happier times, the narrator pesters Aesop for the meaning of his fables and their ultimate aim. But she is rarely successful. Despite the fact that Aesop has ‘yanked’ her back to his time to observe him, he is not very cooperative, even morose:

He tells me to be quiet. He says, ‘You are, after all, only a figment of my imagination, hauled in from the future.’

‘And you and your fables,’ I retort, ‘are only a figment of everyone else’s imagination. Nobody knows who you really are.’

The narrator is invisible to people, but is heard by those who tune into her. They call her Sprite, which she hates – and later, Tipon, the Greek version of a TPN, or a Third Person Narrator.

The Cock And The Fox by Milo Winter, 1919.As we progress through this small book, we are informed, teased, and challenged all at once. We get to know the sketchy facts, many contested, of Aesop’s life. He was probably born in India, or possibly Egypt. Namjoshi, of course, roots for India. He is brown, not black, as some people have thought. And much of his life is spent in slavery on the island of Samos.

A picture emerges of life in the sixth century BCE: earthen floors, a monotonous diet of fish, chickpeas and bread, goats tethered by the door, basic dormitories for the slaves, their only possession a bit of bedding. Athens on the mainland is a dusty rundown town, before it hit its glory days a few centuries later.

As Sprite is in on all conversations, she gets to meet the famous young Pythagoras (even though Namjoshi cheerfully admits to stealing him from another time). They have a stimulating discussion about the ‘metempsychosis’ of souls – the sixth-century-BCE version of time travelling. All this is informative and entertaining, but deeper meanings and questions are always lurking. When the talk falls to the difference between men and women, Pythagoras is unabashedly a young glib male, putting down women without thinking. ‘Aesop and Aglaia, [Jadom’s wife] glance at each other. They are both appalled. Perhaps women and slaves have something in common? Dependence. Powerlessness. And Fear. Bright Sprite! I knew all that. Didn’t have to go back to the sixth century B.C. Suddenly I’m cross with myself. What do I want from Aesop?’

So she tests the ideas of twentieth-century feminism on Aglaia, beautiful and intelligent, and content with her lot. Aglaia is puzzled by the questioning, but as discussion deepens, Sprite understands that Aglaia is a strategist and deep down already a feminist. ‘I’m silenced. Perhaps Aglaia doesn’t need to have her consciousness raised. Perhaps she already knows a thing or two.’

All the way through, different versions of fables are discussed and interpreted: how you can fit different morals to a story and vice versa. Are the fables just cautionary tales or are there stronger moral and intellectual dimensions?

When local politics change dramatically in Samos, Jadmon has to make a crucial decision: which side should he be on? The Sprite can tell him what the history books say, so, in order to curry favour with the new ruler, Jadmon travels with Aesop to Delphi to deliver some treasure for the priests. My attention waned with the particulars of this journey until I grasped Namjoshi’s drift. She tells her characters that some ‘unreliable’ future accounts say that Aesop was thrown off a cliff and killed at Delphi. So it is up to her, as the ‘Tipon’, to change this tale, if she wishes. She has many doubts: this narrator is a more ‘doubtful’ Third Person Narrator than an ‘unreliable’ one.

As we are in Ancient Greece, the text sometimes reads like an alternative Socratic dialogue. But the voice is a more feminine one: unwilling to trade in absolutes, wanting to hear the legitimate claims of other voices, always questioning her central function to control or manipulate the narrative. In the end, she contrives to postpone Aesop’s death: a happier ending. But Aesop packs Sprite to back to her own century with many questions unanswered. She wants a role for truth and justice and progress, but Aesop is not interested. When she is gone, he says, he will be free:

‘Free from what?’

He looks surprised, as though the answer should be obvious. ‘From you, Sprite. From your unreliable books and prescriptive fantasies. From your wanting to confine me and my work to a fixed, unalterable thing. We live in time, Sprite. Don’t you understand? The dream mutates and shifts.’

And he hurls her back to her own ‘broken world’.

What ‘moral’ are we to take away? Let the fable speak for itself. Each reader in each place and time will have his or her own meanings. ‘The fables remain – some of them anyway – repeated, mutated, fizzing with energy.’

To what extent does the social practice of inheritance undermine social justice? Indeed, if inheritance does further inequality, should we, in order to ensure a fairer society, restrict the right to bequeath?

A mainstay of political philosophy since the late seventeenth century, questions such as these were still vigorously debated in the public sphere in the early twentieth century. However, one hundred years later one rarely hears the topic raised in public debate, despite the fact that, as anthropologist David Graeber and many others have argued, inequality is once again on the rise, and demonstrably so.

The first season of Netflix’s drama The Crown sees the young Princess Elizabeth’s constitutional education taken in hand by Eton history master Henry Marten, whose schooling of the future monarch was largely historical rather than legal, a necessity given Britain’s unwritten constitution.

In 1975, as reported in Paul Kelly and Troy Bramston’s The Dismissal (2015), Sir John Kerr undertook his own constitutional education upon becoming Australia’s governor-general, convening an academic seminar at Australian National University. Kerr soon steered the seminar – established ostensibly to consolidate various instructions given to governors-general over the years – towards his interest in the reserve powers: those powers of the monarch, or their representatives in Westminster systems, which may be exercised without, or against, the advice of the government of the day. These include the power to appoint and dismiss governments, and the power to refuse a dissolution of parliament. To Australians, the reserve powers are best known from Sir Philip Game’s dismissal of Jack Lang’s government in New South Wales in 1932, and Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.

For more than thirty years, Paul Collins has been His Holiness’s loyal opposition. Absolute Power is the latest round in his spirited debate with the Vatican, the government which has the largest constituency of any in the world.

Collins’s interest, in fact obsession, is in the nature and limits of that licence to govern – except that he would question whether the notion of government should come into it at all. The crucial text for his case is Christ’s rebuke to the squabbling apostles: ‘Anyone who wants to become great among you, must be your servant ... For the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve.’ But this is a tricky text. Christ, as the incarnate God, remains boss. So the pope may be referred to as ‘the servant of the servants of God’. But any monarch, whether tyrannical or benevolent, serves a people by calling the shots for them.

According to one of Karl Marx’s most quoted formulations, history always repeats itself twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. One may see the famous – and, of course, infamous – nineteenth-century German radical according to his own schema. We may imagine the severe, thickly bearded founder of dialectical materialism as a modern, tragic reincarnation of the historical figure of the revolutionary: a Dickensian, poverty-stricken exile in place of the rebellious tribunes and slave rebels of ancient Rome. If so, can we not also view the current revival of interest in Marx and his politics as anything other than farcical?

Consider the melodrama around the unveiling of a rather uninspiring statue to commemorate the two hundredth anniversary of the philosopher’s birth in his native city of Trier, donated by one of the most ruthless capitalist forces in human history, the hilariously titled current ‘Communist Party’ of China. The apparent opposition between the local city authorities’ desperate desire to attract Chinese capital and tourists, and the demonstrations against the raising of the statue (led by a dubious amalgam of fascists and New Ageists) is not dissimilar to an episode of the comedy television show Parks and Recreation. At the time of writing, no Marxist hashtag campaign has either been launched or endorsed by ‘woke’ multibillionaire celebrities, but Teen Vogue’s recent article profiling the ‘anti-capitalist scholar’ alongside the promotion of $850 Crocs slippers is nothing if not farcical.

The appearance of a New and Selected Poems by a widely loved and admired poet has all the pleasures of a major retrospective, but viewed alone, without the clamour of a gallery event. It’s in the nature of retrospective to raise the banner of analysis-as-public-spectacle. What does this art mean to us, and how is it unique? The artist’s own words form part of the context for understanding the lifelong happening that is the body of work. It seems fitting, then, that Judith Beveridge’s Sun Music: New and selected poems opens with an extended author’s note.

Kevin Brophy’s latest book is a record of the year he spent living in the remote Aboriginal community of Mulan. The community is home to predominantly Walmajarri people, and is on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert, sixteen hours’ drive from Broome. He was given a decomposing house to live in – a ‘fixer-upper’, by all accounts – and spent his lunchtimes volunteering in the school library.  The rest of his slow days were spent in gentle, intimate observation and participation in the eddies of community life.

Brophy animates the specificities of remote community life with the masterful imagery that Australian letters has come to expect from a poet of Brophy’s calibre and experience. He writes of the ‘baked corrugations’, the ‘rotting road’, and the red sandstone hills ‘worn down to their gums’. A brief storm ‘shoulders  every tree in town / like a drunk weaving  home through a crowd’. He writes of the ‘dark liquid knowledge’ lapping in the eyes of a camel, and the chilled meat in the local shop (the only shop), which looks ‘freshly torn / from panicked creatures’.

The basic thesis of this book is that the gay movement has settled for accommodation rather than radical change, ignoring the ways in which larger social and economic inequalities impact on large numbers of homosexual and transsexual people, especially those who are not white or middle class. This is not a new critique, although it is one that is particularly resonant in Donald Trump’s America. Has the Gay Movement Failed? could be an important corrective to the more triumphalist account that sees changes in attitudes to sexual and gender diversity as some of the major progressive gains of the past half century.

Born in 1825, Brisbane is an elderly lady who has been to a surprising number of ‘coming of age’ balls. Numerous historians, officials, speechmakers, and journalists for several decades have implied that Brisbane (as of 1982, 1988, or whenever) is now not only the belle of the ball, but she has thrown out all reminders of her daggy, embarrassing, and sinister past and is now a sophisticated city much like all the others. The end of the convict era (1842), the mass presence of allied troops during World War II, the 1982 Commonwealth Games, and the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art (2006) have all been used as symbols of a Brisbane shedding the old Queensland so as to blossom into the new one. Another popular candidate for Brisbane’s ‘coming of age’ is its successful hosting of World Expo 88, an international exposition that brought good publicity to the state of Queensland and was enjoyed and ‘owned’ by the people of Brisbane. Thirty years after the event, Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World is a fascinating and well-researched account of Expo 88, admirably broad in its scope, although somewhat limited by its ‘coming of age’ narrative.

Studies of the ancient Mediterranean are increasingly popular. Once a privilege of the élite, whose schools prepared predominantly male students for tertiary study of Greek and Latin, Classics now has a much wider audience. This is partly the result of scholars such as Mary Beard (recently the recipient of a damehood) who have made inroads into popularising ancient Greece and Rome. While general interest is on the rise, study of the languages has stagnated in most Western countries, and translations have largely replaced reading works in the original language. This means that, more than ever, translators need to be attentive to the nuances of a Greek or Latin text, and to capture the essence and tone of the literature, while providing accuracy at the same time.

Oral truths

Dear Editor,
Alan Atkinson is fair to grant the meticulous scholarship of Stephen Gapps some more or less unreserved praise for his recent book The Sydney Wars (ABR, August 2018). But I had hoped that Atkinson would notice the significant gap in Gapps’s sources: the lack of Aboriginal testimony. The Sydney peoples know their history very well, especially, of course, the more recent. Within the communities there is still much information as to which clans helped whom in fighting the Redcoats, and of events that did not make it into the official archives. There is even a set-piece Dharawal narrative of the Appin massacre quite unlike any of the published accounts. It is almost fifty years since a few historians of Aboriginal Australia began to take oral history seriously – and actually get out there and start talking. There really is not much excuse now for not listening to Indigenous voices.

Peter Read, ANU, Canberra

Alan Atkinson replies:

Thanks to Peter Read for that important comment. I would not challenge his knowledge of the area, but I think he goes too far in saying that my praise for the book was ‘more or less unreserved’. I do mention at the end, too vaguely I suppose, ‘the limitations of Gapps’s approach’. There I include the need in any more comprehensive account for ‘a more relativist understanding of violence’, but I should have been more explicit altogether about missing Aboriginal perspective. As I did say, the book seems to me to do very well within its own implied parameters. There is much more to the story, but there can be real virtue, surely, in retelling the story of invasion mainly from a European perspective. Stephen Gapps, in doing so, (one) demonstrates that the invaders themselves had a fairly clear sense of what they were doing and what they were up against, a clarity lost to historians later on; and (two) tells a story that, while it misses some of the larger subtleties of our current ‘moment of truth’, probably matches fairly neatly the language of international human rights, which has to be one-size-fits-all (but I defer to experts there). All that said, no doubt Gapps might have made himself safer by being more explicit as to the purpose and limitations of his study.

Uncomfortable truths

Dear Editor,
Marilyn Lake’s review of Best We Forget: The war for White Australia, 1914–18 (ABR, August 2018) contains several errors that are gross misrepresentations. I will mention just two. At the outset, Lake suggests that I am arguing that Australia went to war ‘not primarily to support the Mother Country in fighting German militarism, but rather to secure the goals of White Australia’. On page nine of Best We Forget, readers will find this sentence: ‘The primary objective, of course, was the defeat of Germany, the survival of Britain and the empire, and the maintenance of those strategic, economic and sentimental ties that most Australians cherished.’ Lake continues in this vein, claiming that I go on ‘to make the case’ for an argument I have not proposed. On the contrary. The second misrepresentation is probably more egregious than the first. Lake cites my reference to the late John Hirst’s belief that ‘history will never beat myth’ and from there proceeds to argue that this is my position. She is quite wrong, and the use made of the reference to my late friend is mischievous because I not only quoted him but went on to say that I was ‘a little more hopeful’ than he. That was gentle understatement. Lake continues in this vein, claiming that I ‘seem to concede defeat in the face of popular storylines’. Careful readers will have noted the epigraph at the beginning of the book, the words of a great historian, Inga Clendinnen: ‘In human affairs, there is never a single narrative. There is always one counter-story, and usually several, and in a democracy you will probably get to hear them.’ In the chapter on popular memory I argue, à la Clendinnen, that in democracies there is plenty of room for contention and controversy and for history to win out, at least in the long run. I say this: What that nation remembers can and does change, but only with vigorous debate and only when the conditions are ripe for change. Uncomfortable truths are not easily resurrected, but this can happen with the eruption of formerly unheard or marginalised voices, or with the piecemeal accumulation of scholarship over time. Or both. In other words, my take on history and myth is the opposite of what Lake proclaims. The book itself, I might add, is another chapter in history’s rejoinder. Lake has overlooked that too. These and other misreadings are gross misrepresentations. Reviewers have a responsibility to authors, and readers, to do better than this.

Peter Cochrane, Glebe, NSW

Marilyn Lake replies:

Peter Cochrane protests too much. In Best We Forget: The war for White Australia, 1914–18, he writes that White Australia’s anxiety about its vulnerability and fear that it might be left to fight an Asian invader alone ‘was the strategic concern behind Australia’s commitment to the First World War’. He chides military historian C.E.W. Bean for self-censorship, stating that ‘he would evade the strategic significance of Japanese militarization in the shaping of Australia’s war’. Bean was one of many historians who would subsequently shape the Anzac legend to their own ends. Cochrane’s book has two themes: one elaborates the significance of race thinking – specifically fear of Japan – in shaping Australia’s commitment to World War I; the second is a reflection on history and popular memory. He regrets the power of popular memory – or myth – to distort history. He quotes John Hirst as saying, ‘My own view is that history will never beat myth’, but adds that he feels ‘a little more hopeful’ and that anyway ‘the historian’s job is to keep at it’. As I noted, he writes as an ‘embattled historian’. Unfortunately, however, Cochrane has misunderstood my review of his book. Rather than charging (‘mischievously’ or otherwise) that he supported Hirst’s position, I sought rather to question the binary terms of the argument, the way in which history and myth have been construed as oppositions, as the American historian Richard White did in his book about Ireland, quoted at the outset of my review. Thus I wrote at the end of the first paragraph that perhaps the ‘assumed opposition’ didn’t really hold, and I returned to this suggestion at the end, writing ‘the conceptual opposition drawn between history and memory – or history and myth – [was] part of the problem’ as it disavowed the role of so many historians, beginning with Bean, in shoring up ‘the perpetual commemoration of the Anzacs’ in Cochrane’s words. This historiography awaits a deeper analysis.

Following this correspondence Peter Cochrane published a further response to Marilyn Lake’s review on the Honest History website.

Savage and scarlet

Dear Editor,
In Paul Giles’s review of Margaret Plant’s book Love and Lament (ABR, June–July 2018), ‘an upbeat account of how the arts flourished’ in Australia in the twentieth century, he mentions, as context, negative accounts in Keith Hancock’s Australia (1930) and Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), but he omits Geoffrey Serle’s positive, revisionist picture in From Deserts the Prophets Come (1973, many reissues and still available, as well as being an electronic resource). This made me think of the way in which the past, even the recent one, is often overlooked in contemporary times. It is disappointing that Serle’s pioneering book on the Australian arts straddling the field, was not referrenced. I recall sitting outside the staff club of Melbourne University, probably in the early 1970s, with Geoffrey Serle, when A.D. Hope entered the club, with a friendly nod. Serle ruefully remarked that he had never asked Hope for permission to adapt his title from the latter’s famous, if not now infamous, poem ‘Australia’, dropping the conditional ‘if’ from the phrase. In this poem, the speaker, returning from ‘the chatter of cultured apes’ abroad, hopes for the emergence of ‘such savage and scarlet as no green hills dare’.

Laurie Hergenhan, St Lucia, Qld

Zeitgeist

Dear Editor,
Beejay Silcox’s Fellowship article ‘We Are All MFAs Now!’, on the rise and rise of US creative writing degrees (ABR, August 2018), would have to be one of the most insightful and well-constructed pieces of writing I have ever had the privilege to read. The author has captured the Zeitgeist of what true writing today should encompass: passion, intellect, and insight. There are clear messages here for Australian writing courses, not only in our universities but in our schools as well: to be honest in intent and accepting of cultural and social perspectives when exploring the vast array of reading material that is available to us thanks to our freedom and democracy.

Joseph Thompson (online comment)

Defending the ABC

Many people shared our concern – and those of the many writers and public figures who signed our open letter – about the future of the ABC. Here are some of their comments, drawn from the website.

I consider the ABC’s value as a public broadcaster to be unique in the modern world. Any attempt to diminish its many voices constitutes cultural vandalism.

Ian McFarlane

The ABC is Australia’s voice. Don’t meddle with democracy just because she says something you don’t like.

Bruce Pascoe

A strong democracy needs objective, honest media, beholden to no one. There have been so many inquiries and reviews into the ABC over numerous years, all indicating that, despite the onslaught from some quarters, the ABC’s objectivity and accuracy are intact. Please retain this wonderful resource our nation has had for ninety years.

Marcia Maher

For all of its flaws, including the occasional stray into the self-referential, the ABC is a critical Australian institution; informing us, buttressing our culture, and sustaining our regional areas.

David Epstein

The assault on the public broadcasters, especially the ABC, is a direct attack on the very substance of our democracy, not to mention our nation’s culture of arts and sciences.

Peter Watson

The ABC reminds me of an archipelago of very different islands of high-quality radio in a sea of mediocrity. Is there a more treasured national institution?

Peter McPhee

ABC has had a lifelong influence on my quality of life. ABC was my introduction to the world outside as a child in the bush. Eighty-three years later, it remains my link to the world. Save the ABC!

Patricia Donnelly

Australia is fortunate in having a national broadcaster that is free from the constant demands and push of consumerism. The range of thoughtful, provocative, and sometimes niche programming would not be found, indeed would not survive, within a broadcast network reliant only on cultivating the highest ratings in order to satisfy advertisers. The great dumbing down or destruction of the ABC would be an unforgivable and negligent act of cultural vandalism that would diminish us as a people and as a nation.

Craig Kirchner

Continue the government support of the ABC, and leave it alone!

David Bardas

Some things are easier to lose than others, but how does a piano come to be mislaid? When that piano has been lugged up and down an island mountain, made one – perhaps two – sea crossings, and been looted by the Nazis, there could be any number of causes for its disappearance, but something more recent and mysterious has led to this now 180-year-old instrument remaining hidden, maybe in plain view. Even more tantalisingly, this is not just any piano: during the difficult winter of 1838–39, when Frédéric Chopin and George Sand stayed in the monastery at Valldemossa, Spain, it was ‘Chopin’s Piano’. Paul Kildea’s new book is the tale of a humble instrument, its story fleshed out in rich and fascinating detail.

Photographs of the piano exist, showing it in Wanda Landowska’s Berlin apartment shortly before World War I, and they confirm the maker’s name. One of the first pictures woven into the well-illustrated text is of the manufacturer’s label: Fabricado por Juan Bauza, calle de la Mision, Palma. In perhaps the most memorable portrait ever made of that remarkable pioneering harpsichordist, Landowska poses for the photographer Alexander Binder next to this piano. Never more than a local piano maker, Bauza would be entirely forgotten today were it not for the fact that – with no idea about the destiny of this instrument – he built the piano on which Chopin composed some of his 24 Preludes.

The third chapter of Axiomatic, ‘History Repeats Itself’, displays Maria Tumarkin’s gifts for threading the subjects of her interviews through personal questions and existential interrogations. Seen through Tumarkin’s eyes, Vanda, an indefatigable community lawyer, fights for her clients inside court and out – those trapped in addiction, the mentally ill, streetworkers. Vanda’s compassion for them not only shows what is needed to make a difference, but also reflects Tumarkin’s scepticism towards language. Tumarkin sketches characters with quirky details, embracing their contradictions, ones that also apply to her themes. While we see the lioness in Vanda, a glimpse of helplessness is also visible, a helplessness before tragedy (and language’s inadequacy to deal with it) that forms a subtext to Axiomatic’s confident tone.

As with her first book, Traumascapes (2005), Tumarkin explores the lingering effects of trauma. However, whereas her début examined the ways in which psychic wounds can mark and shape our conceptions of geography and place, here her focus is on temporality and consciousness. Axiomatic examines pressures that squeeze and infiltrate memory: teen suicide, drug addiction, the violence of war. Many of the subjects interviewed understand that the memories of their traumas demand resistance as well as grace. There is no easy path to this, much less to explaining how past traumas condition present perceptions. In the second chapter, a woman hidden and thus saved during World War II is jailed after hiding her grandson to save him from his parents’ violence. Did she project onto her present Australian reality the lens she acquired as a child, or did she simply do what was required?