Behrouz Boochani describes being smashed into the sea by the boulder-like weight of an overpacked, splintering boat transporting asylum seekers from Indonesia to Australia. The wreck’s ‘slashed carcass’ gashes the flailing survivors and the bodies of those who have died, and Boochani settles under a wave, finding refuge ‘by imagining myself elsewhere’. Finding the strength to surface, he sees a group of men clinging to a wooden spar torn from the battered boat. Its spikes lacerate Boochani’s legs as he sinks and surfaces amid violent waves. A British boat approaches: ‘our gruelling odyssey has come to an end’. Having faced death in those underwater moments, Boochani reflects that ‘even a brush with mortality gives life a marvellous sense of meaning’.

If it were a piece of fiction, this intense account of being rescued would settle after its zenith. The writing recalls other stories of refugees’ sea journeys to Australia, such as Nam Le’s celebrated 'The Boat'. But Boochani’s work is not fiction, and respite is illusory.

It is July 2013, days before the Kurdish poet and journalist’s thirtieth birthday and days after the second Rudd government’s announcement of measures to reinforce its borders by turning back asylum seekers arriving by boat. After a month on Christmas Island – CCTV cameras in the toilets, strip searches, and the issuing of ludicrously ill-fitting polyester clothing – Boochani is transferred to Manus Island, one of the offshore immigration detention centres originally set up by the Howard government in 2001.

Boochani, whose educational background includes a postgraduate degree in political science, political geography, and geopolitics, began to record his experiences of what he names Manus Prison. The word expresses the loss of asylum seekers’ freedom and highlights a dark irony: a prison legally holds prisoners as punishment for a crime or while awaiting trial. Given that Australia is a signatory to the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, with its principle of non-refoulement – which guarantees protection to refugees who have reason to fear persecution should they return to a particular country – the question of legality is important here. Several arms of the United Nations have condemned Australia’s policy of offshore processing.

No Friend But the Mountains is a work of witness. Richard Flanagan, in his foreword, acknowledges the ‘near impossibility of its existence’. Written in Farsi, amid the traumatic deprivation it evokes, the narrative was sent as text messages to refugee advocate and translator Moones Mansoubi, who formatted the material and sent it to Sydney University academic Omid Tofighian. Others involved include Janet Galbraith, founder of Writing Through Fences, an organisation devoted to enabling the writing of refugees, and Sajad Kabgani, a PhD student who worked with Tofighian and Mansoubi to produce the translation. Arnold Zable provided feedback and encouragement.

In its steady witness, No Friend But the Mountains recalls accounts of the Shoah such as Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man (1947), which Philip Roth described as motivated by the need ‘systematically to remember the German hell on earth, steadfastly to think it through, and then to render it comprehensible in lucid, unpretentious prose’. Levi, who describes a dream of relating his experiences of Auschwitz with no one is listening, is driven by the need to ‘bear witness’, conscious of the words of a guard who taunts prisoners that if they were to survive, their testimony would soon be considered ‘too monstrous to be believed’. Boochani, too, writes against forgetting. In his case, though, bearing witness to history abuts a project of informing the world beyond Manus Island of what is happening there now. This extends Boochani’s work as a journalist.

The work transcends memoir, especially because Boochani is often self-effacing. The blaze and flicker of his self-assessment limns a more empathetic project through which he examines larger questions of the nature of human behaviour and the search for an adequate way to name and anatomise the cruel experiment that is offshore detention.

In this sense, Boochani’s work recalls psychiatrist Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (1946). At once an account of Frankl’s experience of concentration camps and the foundational expression of his psychotherapeutic method, logotherapy, Man’s Search for Meaning argues that human suffering, while unavoidable, might be endured best by having some focus beyond it, by having a sense of meaning. ‘Those who have a “why” to live,’ Frankl wrote, ‘can bear with almost any “how”.’ For Frankl, the salvation of humanity is ‘in love and through love’.

Boochani’s project shares this kind of philosophical enquiry. In his translator’s note, Tofighian strives to illuminate the book’s various generic elements to frame its reading. Supplementary transcripts of discussions between Boochani and his interlocutors continue this. Of these, the use of the term ‘kyriarchy’, first used by feminist theologian Elisabeth Schlüssler Fiorenza to describe enmeshed social systems of domination and oppression, is a key aspect of Boochani’s project.

Behrouz Boochani (photo by Hoda Afshar)Prose is interspersed with ribbons of poetry. These lyrical slivers are drifting and meditative, though they enclose moments of trauma as well as respite. For Boochani, as for many vastly more privileged poets, isolation and silence are treasured. He writes of longing ‘to isolate myself and create that which is poetic and visionary’. In the intensely hot, crowded spaces of the centre, he asserts his indomitable imaginative freedom: ‘the mind still has the power to leave the prison and imagine the coolness under the shade of a bunch of trees on the other side of the fence’.

Boochani is a prodigiously gifted poet and prose stylist. There are few false notes. When he describes the bodies of female lawyers visiting the complex, what may sound like objectification underscores the inhumanity of secluding people from the liberty to love. His fleeting allusion to past loves highlights the barbarity of five years of isolation.

Like No Friend But the Mountains, the chapbook of poems Truth in the Cage by Mohammad Ali Maleki has been produced with the help of Australian supporters. Their translator is fellow detainee Mansour Shoushtari, whose interview by Boochani was published in the Guardian. Boochani writes that Shoushtari ‘projects beauty, he projects tenderness, he projects kindness’.

Mohammad Ali Maleki with a rainbow lorikeet in his graden on Manus Island. (Photo via Rochford Street Review)Maleki tends a garden on Manus Island, yet his poems evoke images of the natural world thwarted or gone awry – ‘the autumn leaf grows green’, ‘the moon implodes’, ‘the butterfly flies back to its cocoon’. In an allegory of refoulement, everything in ‘Silence Land’ is turned back: the tree to its seed, the sea to its source, the river to its spring. In the more surreal ‘Myself’, groans swell the sky, the sea becomes stormy and fish ‘[scatter] in fear’.

The book’s first poem, ‘Dream of Death’, begins by addressing readers as ‘my dears’, and implores: ‘please, I ask you, listen’. Both Boochani and Maleki evoke the experience of there being absolutely nothing to do and the impact this has on the mind. Each writer has endured this year after year.

Although Maleki writes of blankness and weariness, in ‘Where is My Name?’, he affirms ‘I won’t neglect to report on these days’. From the ‘cursed city’ of Manus, he writes tender works of witness and consolation commemorating others people’s deaths – Hamed Shamshiripour, who died by hanging, and Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian asylum seeker whose body was washed up on a Turkish beach. Yet for all their gentleness, these are steely poems, refusing silence and namelessness.

Boochani interrogates his history of ‘non-violent resistance’, of choosing the pen over fighting, but these important books offer ways forward that violence in response to violence is unable to do. And each recalls Paul Celan’s courageous insistence on literature as resilience: ‘Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss.’

Who can forget the image of Scott Morrison, as federal treasurer, juggling a lump of lacquered coal in parliament on 9 February 2017? Appearing pretty chuffed with his own antics, Morrison urged people not to be afraid. Eighteen months later, the jester is now prime minister. His ascension results from one of the most undignified and ill-conceived political coups in Australia’s political memory. The Liberal Party clambers from the rubble of its bitter internal ruptures with the same foot soldiers of big coal even more prominent.

In Adani and the War Over Coal, Quentin Beresford provides detailed analysis of each policy switch and deal struck by politicians and mining corporations to advance the coal industry. Politicians with personal interests vested in coal radically deploy the power of their office to smooth and broaden the reach of resource corporations. Pugilistic audacity and naked entitlement characterise a war conducted on behalf of big coal against Australian citizens and environments.

Bruno Latour is one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists. Based in France, he brings a refreshingly non-Anglophone approach to the big political problems of our times. At the heart of his latest book are the hypotheses that ‘we can understand nothing about the politics of the last 50 years if we do not put the question of climate change and its denial front and center’, and that ‘a significant segment of the ruling classes … had concluded that the Earth no longer had room enough for them and for everyone else’. These are strong and challenging statements, but, as Latour says, how else to explain the ‘explosion of inequalities, the scope of deregulation … or the panicky desire to return to the old protections of the nation state’ that are so characteristic of much of current politics?

There is a running joke in Japan that autumn doesn’t start each year until Haruki Murakami has lost the Nobel Prize for Literature. Most recently, in 2017, he lost to Kazuo Ishiguro, who was born in Japan but is now a British citizen. To date, two Japanese writers have been awarded the prize – Yasunari Kawabata (1968) and Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) – and many believe Murakami will be the next Japanese laureate. However, it won’t be this year, because the Nobel Prize for Literature has been postponed due to a sexual misconduct scandal, and while Murakami was one of four finalists for the substitute New Academy Prize, he has recently withdrawn from the prize stating that he wants ‘to concentrate on his writing, away from media attention’.

Any Ordinary Day, Leigh Sales’s investigative report from the coalface of tragedy and resilience, is based on solid research and lengthy interviews. Sales, who wants to know the secrets of surviving outrageous fortune, has the journalistic chops to take on the quest. ‘I rely on a particular skill set … I know how to craft a line of questioning,’ she writes early in her new book. Readers familiar with Sales’s on-camera persona as the anchor of ABC television’s The 7.30 Report will perhaps brace themselves for some field surgery as she probes the testimonies of people who have met and overcome one or more tragedies. But those readers may be surprised.

In the Melbourne Museum is a collection of rainforest leaves. Wafer thin, they are not part of the forest gallery that gives visitors a taste of Victoria’s modern-day temperate rainforest. Rather, they are part of an exhibition about the tropical rainforest that Victoria was home to millions of years ago. Donated by the late palaeobotanist David Christophel – who explains in a video on the museum website that he never stopped feeling excited at being the first human to lay eyes on fossils buried millions of years ago – the fragile leaves are from the warm, moist Eocene period, about forty to fifty million years ago, when Australia was still part of the fragmenting supercontinent, Gondwana.

What was your pathway to publishing?

Circuitous and fortuitous, seeming inevitable only in retrospect. After university, where I studied literature and social theory, I did many bookish jobs: helping with the mail-out at ABR under Helen Daniel, reviewing books, receiving books, selling books, buying books – all at Readings – editing books, teaching editing, and so on. Eventually, I lucked into a job with Black Inc. and found myself on the ground floor of an expanding enterprise with a simpatico and highly creative boss.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Most years I publish around twenty-five new books. There are also new formats of previously published books. Overall,

For a homeless person, home is the street and the moveable blanket or bedroll. Ultimately, the only home remaining is the body. Fiona Wright is not homeless, she has been un-homed by her body’s betrayal. Whether she can ever feel that she fits again is the primary theme of her second collection of essays, The World Was Whole. That her body was once fitting and knowable, that the world was once whole, is suggested by the title, which comes from Louise Glück’s poem ‘Aubade’:

A room with a chair, a window.
A small window, filled with the patterns
light makes.
In its emptiness the world

was whole always, not
a chip of something, with
the self at the centre.

Icebergs loom large in Joy McCann’s Wild Sea: A history of the Southern Ocean. They are one of the most recognisable features of the higher latitudes of the Southern Ocean and the one that people often look forward to the most when voyaging south for the first time. Ice gets its own chapter in an inspiring book that spans the geologic and human history of this great swath of howling, tide-swept body of water that girdles the world.

The geography of art post 1945 has a boringly settled look and needs disturbing. This engaging and readable book makes a useful starting point. The standard view begins with the switch of the centre from Paris to New York, and so it remained for the next fifty years or so until the shoals of post-minimalism washed up on the stony beach of postmodernism.

Afew years ago, while taking a tram through Melbourne’s inner-northern suburbs, I decided to visit the Northcote factory – an industrial laundry – where my father worked as a storeman between 1973 and 1982. Or rather, I thought I’d check to see whether the business was still there, for I hadn’t been anywhere near the place in the more than thirty years since his death.

In 2014, veteran ABC science broadcaster Robyn Williams was diagnosed with bowel cancer. It was, he reports, his third brush with death, following cardiac arrest in 1988 and bladder cancer in 1991. His description of the experience, including surgical reduction of his gut and rectum and subsequent debilitating chemotherapy, is brief but graphic. He has survived, but the experience, as he puts it, quite literally, gave him the shits. More positively though, it also resulted in this book: a collection of letters from the brink, ‘the book you write when you don’t have much time left’, although it is not entirely clear whether this lack of time is his own or, collectively, ours.

Why do you write?

Kristina OlssonIt’s always about a question; the book is my attempt at answering it. The learning curve is what lures me to the desk each day.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

On and off, but I rarely get the spectacular or the memorable.

Where are you happiest?

Jan Zielonka has provided us with an engaging and stimulating diagnosis of the pathologies of the European crisis of liberalism. The prognosis is not great, but there is hope.

This short book takes the form of an intergenerational letter to Zielonka’s former mentor, the émigré German liberal intellectual Ralf Dahrendorf. Dahrendorf wrote a treatise on the European revolutions of 1989, which was in turn based on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). This intergenerational aspect of the book means that there are several ghosts at the banquet: notably the French Revolution of 1789 and the liberal-national revolutions of 1989. Yet the 1930s are lurking between the lines, too: there is more than a ‘whiff of Weimar’ about this analysis of the ‘counter-revolution’ against the post-Cold War order.

Who doesn’t like to read about the Cambridge spies? Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby were all students at Cambridge in the early 1930s when they were converted to communism and later recruited as Soviet spies. The Cambridge Four did decades of sterling work for the Soviets. Having risen to senior positions in the British Foreign Office (Maclean and Burgess), the British intelligence service MI6 (Philby) and as Surveyor of the Queen’s Paintings (the art historian Blunt). To be sure, it was not always appreciated in the Kremlin, since from Moscow’s standpoint it all looked too good to be true, not to mention distractions like the Great Purges and World War II playing havoc with their networks.

The story of Burgess and Maclean’s successful ‘exfiltration’ to the Soviet Union made international headline news in 1951, and the same was true in 1963 when Philby followed them through the Iron Curtain. By the 1970s a reverse movement of family members out of Moscow had begun, with Maclean’s American wife, Melinda, returning to the United States and his three children to Britain. (Shortly after his re-entry, I encountered a still shell-shocked Donald Jr and his wife at a party in London and gave them a lift home.) As for the Fourth Man, the British had known about Blunt’s spying since the 1960s, but he was publicly outed only in 1979, strangely without punishment except for the loss of his knighthood.

Through an avalanche of publication, including some by the spies themselves, the Cambridge Four have become as familiar to anglophile readers as the Mitford family. So my first reaction on seeing this new book on Maclean was that it would be excellent light reading for a long flight, offering the pleasure of entering a familiar world of the imagination whose tenuous connection with reality is irrelevant. The idea that there might actually be something new in this Maclean biography did not cross my mind.

I was wrong, but it was a while before I realised my mistake. I had read, with pleasure but without keen attention, a number of nicely written chapters covering familiar ground: childhood – stern, upright father, success at a public school that inculcated habits of secrecy and deception; university (covered only briefly, unusually); recruitment as a spy; entry into the Foreign Office. The Donald Maclean presented here is a high achiever, reacting to some extent (but not flamboyantly) against his father’s conservative moralism, who was drawn to the idea of a double life and got a kick out of it. The bit I didn’t remember reading before was Maclean’s enjoyable affair – in the late 1930s before he met and married Melinda – with his Soviet handler, the East End-born Kitty Harris. This satisfied his needs for secrecy and support, despite breaking all the rules of tradecraft.

With Maclean’s appointment in 1944 as Second Secretary in the British Embassy in Washington, the story moves to the United States, where he provided the Soviets with remarkably good high-level information but sailed close to the wind because of his distaste, clearly expressed when drunk, for American mores and, above all, for American policy in the Cold War. Of course, he wasn’t the only senior person in the British Foreign Office to be anti-American. Nor was he the only one to go on drunken binges, though Maclean, except for a later, brief episode in the Middle East, was not in Burgess’s class as a drunken, loose-lipped troublemaker. Maclean’s normal story was that he had been on the left in youth but had outgrown it; however, on more than one occasion when drunk, he told friends and even acquaintances that he was a communist and/or Soviet spy. Nobody took this seriously. As in the case of Philby, the British establishment (and particularly the Foreign Office) displayed amazing zeal in protecting their own and turning a blind eye on outrageous behaviour.

The Maclean family, 1950. Left to right: Donald, Fergus, Melinda, and Donald

So far, so familiar, though it’s all admirably done, by an English ex-publisher with family connections to both Maclean’s Foreign Office world and his left-wing one, using newly opened Foreign Office and MI5 archives as well as the extensive older documentation. I was more than half way through the book when I noticed that Philipps’s Maclean, though labelled an enigma in the title, was emerging not as a mixed-up, schizoid double-dealer with charm and good social connections (the standard composite picture of the Cambridge Four) but rather as a man of political convictions (pro-peace; anti-American; pro-Soviet but not blindly so; concerned about social justice and critical of the British class system) to which, despite his double role, he adhered fairly consistently throughout his life. To my surprise, I found this argument basically convincing, to the point that, as far as I was concerned, Philipps had succeeded in contradicting his own title: Maclean is no longer an enigma, because Philipps has explained him.

Roland Philipps (photo via Midnight in the Desert)The next surprise was what happened after Maclean goes to the Soviet Union in 1951. There are some difficult years of debriefing and idleness in the boondocks (Kuybyshev) before the Macleans (Melinda had joined him after a few years, unhindered by British surveillance) were able to return to Moscow in 1955; and it took a few more years for Donald to get a job that really suited him as a researcher at Moscow’s prestigious Institute of the World Economy and International Relations. But Philipps’s unexpected conclusion is that Maclean liked his new life in the Soviet Union. This – based, admittedly, only on English-language materials; though the Russian, had Philipps had access to them, would probably only have strengthened his case – goes completely against the standard (Western) Cambridge Four narrative, which is that the ex-spies were desperately bored and unhappy in their uncongenial Moscow exile. Maclean, as Philipps recounts it, dropped his binge drinking in Moscow, found satisfaction in his job, got on well with his think-tank colleagues, and won respect inside and even outside the Soviet Union for his scholarly analyses of foreign policy. Needing a new identity in his first years in the Soviet Union, he took the name of Mark Petrovich Frazer, after the Scottish author of the anthropological classic The Golden Bough (1890). But by the time his foreign policy book came out in Moscow in the 1970s, he felt free to publish under his real (if Soviet-inflected) name: Donald Donaldovich Maclean.

In her influential 1961 text The Death and Life of Great American Cities, American-Canadian urban activist Jane Jacobs famously characterised the complex order of a successful city as ‘an intricate ballet’. The ‘dance’ of a thriving city sidewalk, says Jacobs, bucks trends of uniformity and repetition in favour of improvisation, movement, and change.

It should come as no surprise, then, that a book named Urban Choreography draws heavily on Jacobs’s work. In their introduction, co-editors Kim Dovey and Ronald Jones shed further light on their choice of title: ‘A city is not a static object but an assemblage of interconnections between people and place. … Urban choreography is the practice of shepherding, of seeking to ensure that synergy and harmony prevail over chaos, but it is not micromanagement of the form or the life of a city.’’

The language we use to describe fire, Chloe Hooper points out, gives it a creaturely shape: it has flanks, tongues, fingers, a tail. It licks, it devours. Fascinated by its mythic force, we talk about taming a fire as we talk about taming a beast, but when it comes to vast tracts of bush, we can only contain it and wait for another natural force, the weather, to extinguish the flames.

On 7 February 2009, the weather in Victoria was not friendly. A high-pressure system had settled over the Tasman Sea, bringing temperatures in the mid-forties, the highest recorded since records began in 1859. Any moisture in the air had evaporated; humidity was below five per cent. After a sweltering night, the state’s residents awoke to warnings of extreme danger; all the firefighting bodies were on standby.

Warnings and water tankers notwithstanding, Victoria suffered the worst bushfires in the country’s history. Four hundred separate fires burned in Victoria, generating 80,000 kilowatts of heat, the equivalent of 500 atomic bombs. Along with the destruction of more than one million acres and 3,500 buildings, 180 people lost their lives and 414 were injured, many seriously. The toll on wildlife and livestock was horrendous.

In The Arsonist, Hooper reignites the memories of those cataclysmic events with relentless, devastating effect. Her focus is on one fire, deliberately lit, an 82,000-acre flare-up on the outskirts of Churchill in Central Gippsland. Eleven people died.

Police estimate that fifty per cent of fires are suspicious, and there is a long history of setting fire to the bush. In the locality of Churchill, the history goes back much further; the careful fire farming of the Indigenous dwellers and the reckless firing of vast tracts of ancient forest by early colonial settlers, hungry for farming land and pasture. ‘Here, it was as if this preference for flames was as much in the DNA of certain locals as it was in the plants,’ she writes.

The Arsonist begins with a member of the arson squad sitting at the intersection of two nondescript roads in a forestry plantation. On one side, the trees are untouched, neat dark rows of Pinus radiata stretching to the horizon. On the other side, a plantation of Eucalyptus globulus (full of flammable oil) has been torched. Americans call them gasoline trees, as fit for purpose as a Molotov cocktail. Hooper likens the scene to an image from the pages of the Brothers Grimm:

Picture a fairytale’s engraving. Straight black trees stretching in perfect symmetry to their vanishing point, the ground covered in thick white snow. Woods are dangerous places in such stories, things are not as they seem. Here, too, in this timber plantation, menace lingers. The blackened trees smoulder. Smoke creeps around their charcoal trunks and charred leaves. The snow, stained pale grey, is ash.

The site of ignition is known both as the area of confidence and the area of confusion; this is where the flames first ignite, before they develop strength and a cohesive pattern and direction. This is where the clues lie, clues that can tell you if a fire was deliberately lit.

Only one per cent of arsonists are caught, but the police had a suspect almost immediately. Brendan Sokaluk and his distinctive blue Holden sedan had been seen in the area, and the car was abandoned at an odd angle just metres from where the fire had started. Sokaluk was brought in for questioning. Hooper gained access to the arson squad and Sokaluk’s legal team; she interviewed friends, work colleagues, and family, and followed the often harrowing court case, trying to answer basic questions: What did he do? Why did he do it? What makes an arsonist?

The book – divided into three sections: ‘The Detectives’, ‘The Lawyers’, and ‘The Courtroom’ – is an attempt to give a rounded view of Sokaluk, from those who wanted to clear his name as well as those who wanted to lock him up. Did Sokaluk fit the bill of an arsonist too neatly, Hooper asks. Was he fully aware of the consequences of his actions? We learn that Sokaluk, thirty-nine in 2009, was on the autism spectrum and had been picked on all his life.

Water tank melted by fire at Kinglake after the Black Saturday bushfires (photo by Nick Pitsas, CSIRO)

The Latrobe Valley, where Sokaluk grew up, may have the world’s largest brown coal deposits, but it is also an area of significant disadvantage. The typical social profile of an arsonist is of a male, commonly unemployed, with a fractured social background, a history of family dysfunction, addiction, abuse, and poor social and interpersonal skills. Sokaluk shared some of these problems, but he had a loving and supportive family. He lived independently and had had girlfriends. He also held down a gardening job for eighteen years, though he was disliked by most of his colleagues for perceived slyness, occasional aggression, and general incompetence. He’d taken indefinite stress leave two years earlier.

As with many works of reportage set in depressed semi-rural settings (the 1997 Victorian case of murdered child Jaidyn Leskie comes to mind), there is a sense of middle-class urbanites peering over the back fences of these ‘unfortunates’ in horrified fascination. Hooper, all too aware of the pitfalls of prurience, does her best to avoid them: we’re never made to regard Sokaluk as merely a type. This is an individual, though his motives remain opaque and his actions caused devastation.

A burntout car at Kinglake after the Black Saturday bushfires (photo by Nick Pitsas, CSIRO)

Unlike The Tall Man (2008), Hooper’s examination of the events surrounding the death in custody of Indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee, placing Sokaluk’s life and times in the broader context, doesn’t reveal a far larger failing in Australian society today. The Tall Man exposed the fracture lines in relations between Aboriginal Australia and its white colonisers. It confronted the deeply problematic encounters between the police force and the community on Palm Island, thrown together from different clans and with no roots in place or time.

The message in The Arsonist is muted, its lessons diffuse. There is no feeling of outrage that this case is but one example of a cancer at the heart of society. What do we learn about arsonists? That they have disruptive impulse control and conduct disorders. What can we learn about forestry and monocultures? That a stand of gumtrees will go up like a pack of crackers, that the Indigenous practice of fire farming shaped this land and kept nature in balance, and that we have shaped this land in a way that throws nature out of kilter and makes annual conflagrations far more likely.

One is left with an overwhelming feeling of sadness. An act of arson on the outskirts of Churchill killed eleven people. Elsewhere, poor maintenance by electricity companies ignited fires that caused many more deaths; others were caused by lightning igniting the tinder-dry bush. The exhaustive 2009 Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission drew testimony from hundreds of experts and victims. But memories fade and few people read Royal Commission reports. The Arsonist may not provide answers, but it asks disquieting questions. Bearing witness, it reminds us of the victims and the terror, the senselessness of a flame tossed onto a forest floor, and the awful silence of a landscape razed by fire.

The fall of Ian Buruma

Ian BurumaEveryone knew that Robert Silvers – founding and long-time editor of the New York Review of Books (1963–2017) – would be a hard act to follow, but it just became a whole lot harder after the ouster of his successor, Ian Buruma, after one year in the seat. As we were going to press, the New York Times reported on his sudden departure from the magazine.

This followed the publication of an essay by Jian Ghomeshi, ‘a disgraced Canadian radio babysitter who had been accused of sexually assaulting and battering women’ (NYT, September 19) Ghomeshi was acquitted of charges of sexual assault in 2016. His essay was one of three related articles published in the October 11 edition of NYRB, under the headline ‘The Fall of Man’. Online publication of the article created a predictable furore on social media. Buruma commented: ‘I’m no judge of the rights and wrongs of every allegation? How can I be?’

Then he was gone.

Alexander Theatre Reopens

 Monash Academy of Performing Arts Executive Director Professor Paul Grabowsky AO outside the new Alexander Theatre (photo supplied)

After a reopening ceremony on Tuesday night 11 October, The Alexander Theatre at Monash University is officially back in the public sphere, having been under restoration since 2016. First opened in 1967, The Alexander Theatre has served the public and the Monash community for half a century, with many notable productions along the way. The refurbished theatre is now the main attraction of Monash’s new Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts, which also features a 130-seat Sound Gallery and a 200-seat Jazz Club. The new design by Peter Elliott Architecture revisits the original plans for the theatre, some of which were unrealised due to a lack of initial funds. The project was financed with $5 million from the Ian Potter Foundation and $10 million from the Victorian government.

ABR Arts

No program has been more transforming for this magazine than ABR Arts, where we review film, theatre, dance, television, music of all kinds, art exhibitions, and much more. The response from the arts community has been enthusiastic. Readers know that ABR Arts – with its lengthy, considered reviews – stands for something rather different from the critical miniatures that we see elsewhere. (We liked the story about the newspaper that sent its tennis editor to review a play be Seneca.)

For the past three years, the Ian Potter Foundation has generously supported ABR Arts with a three-year seeding grant, which enabled us to greatly extend our arts coverage. We are most grateful to the Potter Foundation for its championship of better arts criticism and for its long-standing support for this magazine.

Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund – an integral supporter since creation of the Calibre Essay Prize in 2006 – will now generously support ABR Arts until the end of 2019.

These grants cover about one-third of our payments to arts journalists (all of whom are paid when they write for ABR Arts). The balance of these payments come from other revenue. ABR Arts – like so many of our other programs – is only possible in its expanded form because of the generosity of the ABR Patrons (all of whom are listed on page 6).

If you would like to support ABR Arts, or know someone who does, please contact the Editor, Peter Rose. Help us to go on providing Australian artists and audiences with the kind of journalism they deserve.

Jesus in Parramatta

Peter GoldsworthyIn Peter Goldsworthy’s novella Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam, published in 1993, the Pollard family seek to isolate themselves from the world and to live through one another, only to be confronted by medical and existential realities

Back in 2015, actor–writer Steve Rodgers won the inaugural Lysicrates Prize for his adaptation of the novella. At the time, the play was described as ‘a rumination on a kind of suffocating love’. This month the National Theatre of Parramatta will present its world première, directed by Darren Yap. The season runs from October 18 to 27.

Meanwhile – when he is not reviewing Les Murray’s new Collected Poems (Black Inc., October) for ABR – Peter Goldsworthy is finalising his new novel, The Minotaur, which Penguin Random House will publish in 2019.

ABR in Sydney

As we extend our presence and publishing in New South Wales, with continuing support from the New South Wales government, we are keen to meet new writers and critics. Peter Rose, who will be in Sydney on October 11 and 12, is available for meetings with reviewers and arts journalists. We’re looking for people who are familiar with the magazine: its style, its content, its mission. If you would like to arrange a meeting, contact Peter Rose at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  

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Humans live on the Blue Planet: seventy per cent of ‘Earth’ is covered by oceans. We increasingly hear these descriptions: that oceans are the largest habitat, that eighty per cent of all species live there, that they determine weather and climate. All of which, and much more, is true. But the meaning of this still fails to find purchase with most people. The edited volume Tidalectics – subtitled ‘Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and science’, and compiling a pelagic compendium to unsettle and then reconfigure assumed certainties – engages with this challenge.

Cane Toads are peculiarly Australian. They don’t belong, yet they thrive here. They breed unnaturally fast – even faster than rabbits. They are ugly, ecosystem-changing, and despised. Introduced in 1935 to eat the pests of sugar cane in Queensland, their numbers have exploded right across Australia’s tropical north. They are famously ‘unnatural’, since Mark Lewis’s popular 1988 film Cane toads: An Unnatural History.

Only in Australia, where they have no close relatives, are they called Cane Toads (their scientific name is Rhinella marinus, formerly Bufo marinus). Originally from South America, the species is now widespread internationally, but its success in Australia is legendary. Elsewhere, toads are common and much loved, part of literary and cultural traditions, and even ‘harbingers of spring’. Here, where cane toads have a history of just eight decades, they are bad news.

Of all the forms of life historically divided into kingdoms, only two – plants and animals – have attracted large bands of human followers. Entire organisations and university departments are devoted to understanding, controlling, and conserving plants and animals, and our cultural domains are saturated with their likenesses. Two of the other kingdoms, Protista and Monera, have arrived on our radar more recently and most often in the guise of pathogens, though recent advances in microbiology have seen the microbiome take on a whole new cultural salience. That leaves Carl Linnaeus’s ‘thievish and voracious beggars’, the fungi.

The eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist François Huber (1750–1831), who is still credited with much of what we know about bees, was almost completely blind when he made his acute ‘observations’ and significant discoveries. Huber studiously recorded the queen bee’s ‘nuptial flight’ and method of impregnation, her reproduction of very useful worker bees when inseminated and less useful drones by parthenogenesis (i.e. without insemination), and her violent, stinging duels with rival queens. Wrought from painstaking experiment, his findings inadvertently challenged common associations of the queen and her commonwealth with chastity, virgin conception, and peaceful government.

‘You’ve seen the hands of statues that men have set by gateways.’

Lucretius

Most writers seek to better their previous books, but in Markus Zusak’s case this goal was particularly difficult, given that his last book was The Book Thief. Published in 2005, it has sold sixteen million copies worldwide and spent ten years on the New York Times bestseller list. It is thus no surprise that Zusak has taken ten years to write Bridge of Clay, his sixth book.

A stranger rides into a one-horse town on a shiny new motorbike. Cue Ennio Morricone music. Except it’s not a stranger, it’s that skinny dark girl Kerry Salter, back to say goodbye to her Pop before he falls off the perch. The first conversation she has is in the Bundjalung language (translated for our benefit) with three cheeky crows. One bites a dead snake in the head and its fangs get wedged onto the bird’s beak, fastening it shut. Chances are it’ll starve to death, thinks Kerry. ‘The eaters and the eaten of Durrongo, having it out at the crossroads.’

That hapless crow is an apt portent for what Kerry encounters in Durrongo in the rest of Melissa Lucashenko’s splendid black comedy, where just about everybody bites and gets bitten in a cycle of ancestral woes and injustices, pointless violence, family dysfunction, and general stuff-ups. I’d have sighed and wept a bit throughout if it wasn’t so funny.

Lucashenko, born of a European father and a Goorie mother, has produced a string of fine novels (notably Mullumbimby, 2013) and essays, but she has said that Too Much Lip was the most difficult book to write. I’m not surprised: it is consistently unflinching and makes no excuses for anyone, black or white. Lucashenko has also said she had in mind Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) and The Beverley Hillbillies television show (1964–71). Somehow she pulls off this zanily incongruous mix of influences.

One thread of plot sounds familiar: big bad Jim Buckley, mayor of Durrongo, plans to bulldoze the Salters’ ancestral land on the river and build a jail, and the family is desperate to stop him. Is this yet another tale of colonial bully boys wanting to destroy a sacred Aboriginal Eden? It’s more complicated than that. Way back when, the men with muskets shot Granny Ava as she swam across the river to save herself and her unborn child. She made it, and without her there would be nobody.

Spectres from the troubled past weave in and out of the story, producing staggering surprises for both the characters and the reader. Meanwhile, Kerry struggles to make sense of her maddening family: Pop, the old bastard, the dying patriarch; Pretty Mary, Kerry’s mother, trying to hold everything together but inclined to hit the Fruity Lexia when the going gets tough; big brother Kenny, always a hair-trigger away from violence; little brother Black Superman, who thought he’d got away to Sydney but is inexorably drawn back; and saddest of all, Donny, Ken’s anorexic teenage son, who escapes into the comfort of war games on his computer. Not to mention a sister who has been missing for decades.

What makes this spark up is Kerry herself, who is not just an observer but an active and frequently aggressive participant, as you’d expect from someone who roars into town on a stolen Harley-Davidson Softail. She’s the one with too much lip, she says with regret, but also a defiant pride: ‘Give the arseholes a blast, then stand and defend, or else run like hell.’ I’m always on Kerry’s side, especially when she’s stupidly courting danger or burgling the enemy stronghold. But I found it a little hard to take that she would fall so fast for Steve, the handsome whitefella, when she has always been drawn to her own kind – black and female. If Jim Buckley is the stock white baddie, Steve comes dangerously close to being the stock white goodie.

Mind you, Lucashenko has a lot of fun reversing the stereotypes as she gives us a lustful portrayal of Steve’s hot bod in language usually reserved for female sex objects. So I can forgive her, especially as most of the characters are caught up in an intricate and horribly sticky web of history, ancient and recent, where it’s very hard to lay conclusive blame, even for heinous crimes. You have to go back to the original ‘hard men’, the invaders and colonisers, and their atrocities – and they too have muddied things with their contribution to the gene pool.

Another astringent pleasure is the blunt and energetic language Lucashenko uses in narrative and dialogue. Much of the story is told in Aboriginal vernacular English and the occasional Bundjalung word that isn’t translated, but the meaning is more or less clear. Here’s Pop showing his granddaughter how the local Mount Monk is shaped like a fist: ‘It’s a gunjibal’s fist waiting for us mob to step outta line, waiting to smash us down. We livin’ in the whiteman’s world now. You remember that.’

Melissa LucashenkoThere were times when I was so horrified I didn’t want to believe what I was reading. Was Lukashenko exaggerating? But she tells us in an afterword that virtually every incidence of violence depicted in the novel has occurred within her extended family at least once.

Somehow Lucashenko wraps up a happy-ish ending from all this evil, hatred, and sorrow. Reconciliation, forgiveness, and understanding are at least on the cards, threats are briskly dispatched, and, paradoxically, the spectacular arrival of the family’s totem shark makes the contrivances more believable.

There is some extraordinary Indigenous writing around at present that heralds a new stage in Australian literature, perhaps in world literature. Too Much Lip is a worthy addition to the work of such original and passionate writers as Kim Scott and Alexis Wright. Talking crows, a talking shark: these are the surreal and symbolic bookends to a story that so often feels hopeless, yet is still the crucible of hope.

‘In time and with water, everything changes,’ according to Leonardo da Vinci, who worked with Machiavelli on a strategic and ultimately doomed attempt to channel the flow of the Arno. Large-scale water management has had some notable successes in parts of Australia, but as poor practices and climate change put river systems under near-terminal stress, we face irreversible and potentially catastrophic ecological failures. Michael Cathcart, in The Water Dreamers (2009), provides an account of this. Attempts to rectify the ecological degradation of our rivers involve expensive and possibly futile federal policies, opportunism, and the potential for suffering in farming communities. Everything may indeed change in time and with water, but changes in water practices in Australia are particularly fraught.

What are the limits of maternal love? How do children fare in its absence? Is mothering a socialised behaviour or a biological impulse? These are the questions Alice Nelson pursues in her second novel, The Children’s House, which draws its title from the name given to the separate quarters alloted to children in the communal child-rearing characteristic of life in kibbutzim in Israel. The idea underpinning this parenting model is utopian, egalitarian, and socialist: the community, rather than the mother or father, assumes responsibility for the child; the parents, alleviated from the financial burden of caretaking, are free to pursue bonding and love in a way that capitalist imperatives preclude.

A son of the French Revolution, Napoleon embedded in French society the Revolution’s core goals of national unity, civil equality, a hierarchy based on merit and achievement, and a rural society based on private property rather than feudal obligations. To these he added the Civil Code, the Bank of France, and other reforms, but he was never able to establish a stable political regime, primarily because internal rule was always subject to the insatiable demands of his external empire.

Napoleon’s obsession with creating a European order under French hegemony came at the expense of perhaps 900,000 of his own people’s lives, and those of a greater number of other Europeans who fought him or who were drafted into his armies. For two million or more Frenchmen who served in the imperial armies, soldiering was a miserable experience: it meant physical privation, fear, disease, and death. But Napoleon’s legacy of horrific numbers of deaths was overcome by the romanticised pride of those who survived: the one million men discharged from the armies in 1814–15. Their tales were embellished across time as subsequent French regimes floundered in a Europe determined to establish a balance of power against any further French imperial fantasies. The power of Napoleon’s legend was also a deliberate creation by the emperor, during the six remaining years of his life, and his acolytes.

In 1786, extraordinary limewood carvings at Hampton Court near London by the seventeenth-century master Grinling Gibbons were destroyed by fire. A recent book by the American carver David Esterly, The Lost Carving: A journey to the heart of making (2012), describes his own commissioned efforts to replicate and replace those carvings. It is a thoroughly enjoyable book. To read it is to sense the pungent majesty of wood and the strange connection between timber and humanity. During carving, by Esterly’s account, the wood under his hand seemed to wrestle, even interweave itself, with the muscles and brain of the carver.

Mythology, Manning Clark regularly assured us, was our ‘great comforter’ because it explained creation, evil, and our place in the world. According to Clark, three ‘mythologies’ were dominant in the formation of non-Indigenous Australia: Protestantism, Catholicism, and the Enlightenment.

The editors begin their introduction to Antipodean Perspective with some ground clearing: ‘The putting together of a series of responses to an important scholar’s work is a classic academic exercise. It is undoubtedly a worthy, but also necessarily a selective undertaking. In German it is called a Festschrift …’ The Festschrift continues to be, in academic circles especially, a way of honouring the work, contribution, influence, and originality of this or that scholar or, sometimes, of a university librarian or outstanding teacher.

'Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.’ Samuel Johnson’s aphorism was commended to me many years ago by Peter Ryan, then the long-serving publisher at Melbourne University Press. The author of a superb personal account of his war experience in New Guinea, Fear Drive My Feet (1959), Ryan had just read a manuscript I had submitted to MUP. It was a critical and possibly excessively sarcastic account of the heroic theme in Australian war writing. My cynicism about the Anzac industry had a personal basis, Ryan seemed to be implying. Apparently I was driven by envy and self-loathing. Nevertheless, he published the manuscript, and in the book I shamelessly deployed the ever-quotable Johnson as an epigraph.

Friendship can be a powerful force for change in a young adult’s life. These four new books explore the full gamut of the unlikely, advantageous, and destructive consequences of relationships.

The search for Shakespeare’s library (the books ostensibly owned by Shakespeare but dispersed without a trace after his death) is driven largely by the hope that marginalia, notes, and drafts might provide unfettered access to authorial intention. Inevitably, the missing library turns out to be central to a number of the anti-Stratfordian cases, including Diana Price’s convoluted and ill-informed set of precepts for determining literary credentials, which yields the ludicrous conclusion that ‘Shakespeare’ was a ‘collective conspiracy’. She deems this more likely than the possibility that Shakespeare’s papers once existed but have simply been lost. Stuart Kells, in Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature, calls her argument ‘intellectually courageous’. Indeed, to the detriment of his own handling of evidence, Kells devotes an inordinate amount of time to the affectionately dubbed ‘Indiana Jones school of Shakespeare studies, whose adherents continue in their efforts to dig up clues, unravel ciphers and commune with the dead’.

In Australia’s golden age of piano production, between 1870 and 1930, the piano was, as Michael Atherton notes, ‘as much a coveted possession as a smartphone or an iPad is today’. The First Fleet imported an eclectic assortment of items, including dogs, rabbits, cattle, seedlings, and a ‘Frederick Beck’ piano. The latter belonged to the naval surgeon George Wogan, who played it on the long voyage. Pianist and historian Geoffrey Lancaster maintains that a piano, of the same brand, now in a collection of 130 instruments owned by the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, is Wogan’s piano.

Sunburnt Country is a fascinating, timely, uneven book. Consisting of forty-one short chapters, it is written by climate scientist Joëlle Gergis, who explores the matter of climate change through an unusual mix of genres: colonial history, popular science, scientific autobiography, and advocacy. The first two of these dominate the self-representations of the book. In particular, it is framed as filling a gap in our (Western) understanding of the Australian continent’s climate history by reconstructing earlier settler colonial climates. Going beyond the official climate records that commenced around 1900, the book reports on innovative Australian research that has combed through settler diaries and other written records for climate-relevant information.

In David Cohen’s collection of wry and quirky stories, he follows the lives of various men in their rituals of ordinariness – their failures, foibles, and fetishes – with a razor-like eye observing the disenchantments of modernity.

The titular story, ‘The Hunter’, opens onto a wasteland of urban gothic, where economic imperatives rub up against the environment. The grubbiness of capitalism is localised in a development site in an unnamed city, home to an endangered ibis population. As protestors gather to decry the removal of these once-sacred birds, the anonymous narrator–developer explains his determination to proceed: ‘We recoil at the sight of their accordion necks. We are repelled by their black torn-stocking heads.’ This coolly detached narrative voice gathers sinister force as the story moves  briskly with the logic of rapacious consumption. Cohen’s tone is perfectly measured in clipped phrasing, the economical clauses mimicking the precision of poetry. This is the diffident voice of the alienated everyman, a voice that, with little exception,  persists throughout the entirety of this collection. The sacrificial fate of the site manager is brutally ironic, an allegory of our failure to recognise our own vulture-like relationship to the environment and each other.

The other stories in this book do not quite match the tension of the first, but Cohen’s tragi-comic sensibility creates some astonishing moments of what we might  think of as the suburban surreal: a recently divorced man’s transposed desires culminates in an erotic fixation with a Hills Hoist in ‘Washing Day’; while in ‘The Woodsmen’, a man becomes disturbingly fond of a chainsaw. Men are unravelled here by their engagement with seemingly banal objects: an electric saw, a screwdriver, a woman’s bra. ‘Although these men lived together,’ says one of Cohen’s characters, ‘their lives  never actually intersected.’ This is a summation of the lives of these strangely ordinary men, and Cohen lucidly highlights the bizarre underside of the real.

A small bay is a cove, and so is a man, according to old-fashioned slang. The Coves takes advantage of this coincidence: it’s a story about a gang of men that rules ‘Sydney Cove’ in the mid-nineteenth century. But this is not the familiar Sydney Cove in New South Wales. There is another one across the Pacific in San Francisco, where arrivals from Australia, ‘pioneers in … viciousness and depravity’, were said to commit ‘atrocious crimes’, according to the novel’s epigraph from Herbert Asbury’s The Barbary Coast (1933).

We first encounter Sam Bellamy, a resourceful and basically decent boy on the cusp of puberty, attempting to appease the mutineers on a whaling ship en route from Sydney to the Californian gold fields. Alone in the world, he is heading to America in search of his mother. Life is cheap both on the ship and on land. In a lawless society, he survives on finely tuned instincts: telling the right stories when he’s noticed, knowing where to hide when he’s not. He and his dog ‘had survived by reading the faces of men’.

If you like your villains barbaric, your headcount high, and your fallen women soft-hearted, The Coves may be the book for you. Young Sam is likeable and ingenuous: when he rates the Coves’ leader, Thomas Keane, as one of the ‘finest men he’d met’ – despite his being a standover man, a killer, and a thief – it no doubt reflects the quality of humans he has encountered so far.

Whish-Wilson’s prose aims for an antique register with elements of both poetry and contemporary slang, which it rarely achieves, straining too often under adjectival overload. He nevertheless tells a vivid adventure story and at the same time reveals a little-known chapter in Australian–American history.

John Hirst

Dear Editor,

It is a tad disingenuous of Marilyn Lake to repeat the quote from John Hirst about history and myth in her review of Peter Cochrane’s Best We Forget: The war for White Australia 1914–1918 (ABR, August 2018) given Hirst’s scathing comments on those ‘deconstructing’ the Anzac story in his 1990 article ‘The Gallipoli Landing’ (reprinted in his Sense and Nonsense in Australian History [2006]). And, by the way, it was Keith Murdoch who was a war correspondent, not his uncle Walter.

Kevin Rattigan, Berremangra, NSW

Marilyn Lake replies:

The myth of Anzac clearly excites strong views. I am disappointed that the critics have not engaged with my intellectual argument that memory and history cannot be so easily disentangled.

Laura Elizabeth Woollett’s novel Beautiful Revolutionary chronicles the decade leading up to the Jonestown massacre in Guyana when Jim Jones, founder of the Peoples Temple, orchestrated the ‘revolutionary suicide’ and murder of more than 900 members of his congregation, as well as the assassinations of US Congressman Leo Ryan, a delegation of journalists, and a defector from ‘the Cause’.

Woollett spent years researching the novel; she interviewed survivors and relatives of the deceased. Given the extent of this research – her preservation of Jones’s name and character, her utilisation of the biographies of those close to him, her detailed representation of the historical events leading up to and including the massacre on 18 November 1978 – it is a curious decision on the author’s part to change the names of other key historical figures, especially Jones’s lover, Carolyn Layton (who, in the novel, becomes Evelyn Lynden), and his wife, Marceline Baldwin (here, Rosaline).

It is time to repent my sins. Recently, I have been asking myself if poetry is exempt from a need to entertain. Is the act of reading a poem or a book of poetry an escapist, amusing, joyous diversion from the rigours of reality? Or is it something more tedious, cold-blooded, blandly intellectual – an act not of enjoyment, but of control and imposition?

If you scan enough poetry criticism, it would be fair to assume that entertainment is a distant consideration in measuring poetic quality. The contemporary critic seems less intent on enjoying the work than on trying to explain it; in effect, coming to own it, being smarter than it, displacing it for the critic’s own broad theories and elucidations. Poetry criticism is a show whose performative message is, ‘I belong here. I get this.’