As chief political correspondent for the ABC’s 7.30, Laura Tingle was a ringside commentator of the latest knockout bout of leadership pugilism in Canberra. Calling the crazed week-long events in the Liberal Party that climaxed in Malcolm Turnbull’s removal from office in August, Tingle probably felt mildly manic herself at the prospect of last-minute revisions to Follow the Leader, her third Quarterly Essay, to take account of yet another prime-ministerial felling. But Turnbull’s deposal only made her subject more compelling – Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, back to Rudd, Tony Abbott, Turnbull, and, for now at least, Scott Morrison. Why has national leadership become so confounding and insecure?

‘Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin spectres.’

Susan Sontag, ‘The Imagination of Disaster’ (1965)

Inspirational Memoirs, Painful Lives, Real Lives – these were the polite terms, the labels you might find on bookshop shelves, but the term that stuck was Misery Literature.

The books had plaintive titles like Tell Me Why, Mummy, and Please, Daddy, No, or single-word gut-punches like Wasted, Fractured, and Damaged. They were first-person accounts of abuse, addiction, and misfortune; of reckonings and redemption. Misery Literature (mis-lit for short) emerged as a furtive literary sub-genre during the great confessional boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s: reality television ascendant; social media new and shiny; best-seller lists heavy with memoir. ‘Volume after volume of leering drug abusers and their fearful victims,’ wrote Guardian journalist Esther Addley, surveying the grim buffet of suffering, ‘coarse, grubby hands probing into tiny pairs of knickers and terrified, saucer-eyed children pleading with them to stop.’

Take Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called ‘It’ (1995) – the book widely credited as mis-lit’s apotheosis – which recounts a childhood of near-inconceivable torment at the hands of a sadistic, chronically alcoholic mother. Pelzer was starved, burned, and stabbed, his face smashed into mirrors, force-fed the contents of his sibling’s nappies with a spoonful of ammonia. His story was one of the worst cases of child abuse in Californian history. It was also a best-seller. The book and its two sequels spent a combined 448 weeks on The New York Times non-fiction best-seller list.

Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward opens with an astonishing incident. In September 2017, Gary Cohn, President Trump’s top economic adviser, removed a letter from the president’s desk. The letter purported to terminate America’s free trade agreement with South Korea – a vital US ally in the Asia–Pacific. Cohn decided he could not afford to take the risk: ‘I stole it off his desk. I wouldn’t let him see it. He’s never going to see that document. Got to protect the country.’

Woodward is a legend in American political reporting. With Carl Bernstein, he exposed Richard Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate break-in and brought down a president in 1974. In the more than four decades since, he has continued to chronicle the American presidency. His great talent is getting well-placed sources close enough to open up to him, albeit on the condition of anonymity. While Trump may have tweeted ‘so many lies and phony sources’ in response to Fear, it speaks to Woodward’s stature and credibility that his reporting on ‘deep background’ is so widely accepted.

Across policy debates, staff firings, international crises, and presidential temper tantrums, Fear paints a damning picture of the president by meticulously reporting the words and actions of those closest to him. From the outset, Trump’s ignorance startles his advisers. On economic matters, Trump ‘clung to an outdated view of America – locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines’. In the global arena, his outlook was equally simplistic. ‘The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.’

Trump’s staff struggle to come to grips with the president’s mendacity on issues large and small. ‘He’s a professional liar,’ Cohn observes more than once. When the president ignored legal advice and agreed to talk to special counsel Robert Mueller (investigating collusion between Russia and the 2016 Trump presidential campaign), his lawyer John Dowd resigned. ‘Mr. President, I cannot, as a lawyer, as an officer of the court, sit next to you and have you answer these questions when I full well know that you’re not really capable.’

Apparently there is no setting, however serious, in which the current president of the United States can be trusted to speak without lying.

In Trump’s moral universe, weakness is perhaps the only unforgivable sin. In August 2017, neo-Nazis, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, members of the so-called ‘alt-right’ and a number of right- wing militias marched through Charlottesville, Virginia to rally against the removal of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. They clashed violently with protestors. The president’s initial response – condemning hatred, bigotry, and violence ‘on many sides’ – appeared to equate those marching with those protesting the march. Prevailed upon by his staff, Trump issued a second statement that explicitly stated ‘racism is evil’ and which singled out hate groups for criticism. When Fox News suggested this was a ‘course correction’, the president was furious. ‘“That was the biggest [expletive deleted] mistake I’ve made,” the president told [staff secretary Rob] Porter. “You never make those concessions. You never apologize. I didn’t do anything wrong in the first place. Why look weak?”’ A day later, Trump doubled down on his first statement: ‘Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me … you also had people that were very fine people on both sides … there are two sides to every story.’

President Donald Trump being sworn in on 20 January 2017 at the U.S. Capitol building in Washington (photo via Wikimedia Commons)

In Fear, Woodward also exposes the enormous ideological division within the administration over America’s place in the world. Trump ran for president as an isolationist: anti-immigration, anti-free trade, and against American military deployment unless for tangible gain. In Trump’s reductionist understanding, trade imbalances were equivalent to countries stealing from the United States, collective defence was ‘a sucker play’, and the United States should aggressively pursue its own interests internationally. For example, on discovering that Afghanistan had extensive mineral deposits, the president told his staff, ‘We need to get a company in there … We should just be in there taking it.’ Later, Trump told then national security adviser H.R. McMaster, ‘I don’t need it done through a [expletive deleted] process! … I need you guys to go in there and get this stuff. It’s free!’

Members of the administration manage to block or delay many of the president’s more extreme proposals. Yet Woodward’s reporting suggests that, left to his own devices, Trump would quite happily withdraw the United States from its commitment to a rules-based international order in pursuit of a better deal – a truly terrifying prospect.

President of Egypt Abdel Fattah el Sisi, King Salman of Saudi Arabia, Melania Trump, and Donald Trump in May 2017 (photo by The White House)

Fear is an engrossing book, but a note of caution is required. Woodward presents the accounts of his sources uncritically, and their agendas – personal and political – pervade the book. There is no analysis of their motives or of the Faustian bargains many have made by working for Trump. Few questions are asked about the legitimacy of staff members actively ‘undermining of the will of the President of the United States and his constitutional authority’.

Further, by relying almost entirely on administration perspectives, the book tends to emphasise the dysfunction in the White House, and obscures some of the administration’s crueller and less defensible actions. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and the forced separation of children from their parents, the Muslim travel ban, Trump’s support for accused sexual predator and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, the half-hearted response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, and the administration’s ongoing voter-suppression efforts, to name a few, are largely ignored.

Fear is also curiously ahistorical. Trump and his movement represent a political strain with a hardy lineage in US politics. But it has always remained at the fringes. In an essay titled ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ (1964), American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote:

[T]he modern right wing … feels dispossessed; America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it … The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialist and Communist schemes; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners but major statesmen seated at the very centres of American power.

Bob Woodward (photo by Jay Godwin/Flickr)That this manner of thinking has metastasised across the Republican Party, largely with the quiescence (and periodic encouragement) of its elected leaders, is a major political development in the United States. That the president traffics in conspiracy theories and retweets Russian propaganda is without modern precedent. Yet, despite his experience, Woodward makes no effort to place the events he describes, or Trump’s ascension more generally, in any historical context. The effect is to subtly normalise the administration.

Fear’s chief attribute is the reporting. Woodward’s sources have dished on the president they serve, and the assessments are brutal. A professional liar. A [expletive deleted] moron. Unhinged. Off the rails. The understanding of a fifth or sixth grader. Zero psychological ability to recognise empathy or pity.

While Trump’s rages and baser impulses are alarming, the dysfunction Woodward portrays actually comes as something of a relief. It may represent ‘a nervous breakdown of the executive power’ in the United States, but it is hard to imagine that the world would be a better place if the administration was more effective at carrying out Trump’s wishes.

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, concerts, operas, ballets, and exhibitions, we invited twenty-nine critics and arts professionals to nominate some personal favourites. We indicate which works were reviewed in ABR Arts and when.

Gabriella Coslovich

‘A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us,’ Franz Kafka famously wrote. Film is equally capable of slashing through the ice – or, in this case, the frozen sea of ‘compassion fatigue’ – as Irish artist Richard Mosse shows with his harrowing video work Incoming (2015–16), the standout, for me, of the National Gallery of Victoria’s inaugural Triennial. Mosse flips the intended use of an enemy-seeking, thermal-imaging military camera and uses it to track the perilous flight of refugees in ghostly black and white. The result is a mesmerising work about the crisis of our times.

Melbourne playwright Patricia Cornelius’s adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, staged by the Melbourne Theatre Company, was equally pertinent. It is a superbly cast and chilling re-imagining of Lorca’s tragic tale about gender and power, set in the oppressive heat of outback Western Australia, with a mining fortune at stake.

The cast of The House of Bernarda Alba (photo by Jeff Busby)

Humphrey Bower

My theatrical highlight of 2018 was Ivo van Hove’s epic multimedia adaptation of Shakespeare’s Kings of War at the Adelaide Festival (ABR Arts, 3/18), featuring Hans Kesting’s deadpan, Keaton-like Richard III. Also at the Festival was the musical performance that moved me most: Jochen Sandig and Sascha Waltz’s immersive staging of Brahms’s (aptly retitled) Human Requiem (ABR Arts, 3/18).

My dance highlight was at Perth Festival: Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa’s mysterious, chthonic Vessel. The visual art installation that most absorbed me was also at the Festival: Lisa Reihana’s vast scrolling panoramic video work Emissaries. My opera highlight was WASO’s concert performance of Tristan und Isolde with Stuart Skelton and Gun-Brit Barkmin, conducted by Asher Fisch (ABR Arts, 8/18), closely followed by Lost and Found’s playful, provocative staging of Charpentier’s Actéon at the UWA Aquatic Centre. Finally, the film that most affected me was BPM (Beats Per Minute), Robin Campillo’s visceral account of AIDS activism in 1990s Paris (ABR Arts, 5/18).

Gun-Brit Barkmin in Tristan und Isolde (West Australian Symphony Orchestra)

Anwen Crawford

Kamila Andini’s The Seen and Unseen, which screened in competition at Sydney Film Festival, is a tonally mysterious, formally assured drama set in Bali. It explores choreography, animism, and dreams in its depiction of twin siblings. Andini, who has completed two feature films, is a director to watch; she elicits terrific performances from her two child leads, Ni Kadek Thaly Titi Kasih and Ida Bagus Putu Radithya Mahijasena – this in a year of outstanding turns by young actors. Thomasin McKenzie, in Debra Granik’s Leave No Trace, was preternaturally wise as the daughter of a traumatised US army veteran. Thomas Gloria, in Xavier Legrand’s Custody, vividly embodied the anxiety, fear, and grief of a young child living in the shadow of a physically abusive parent. On a lighter note, the young cast members of Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird – including Saoirse Ronan, Lucas Hedges, and Beanie Feldstein – were, by turns, comic and poignant in their ensemble evocation of suburban teenage life (ABR Arts, 2/18). 

Promotional image for The Seen and Unseen

Michael Shmith

At the end of 2017, and too late for last year’s highlights, I marvelled at Opera: Passion, Power and Politics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (ABR Arts, 11/17). This extraordinary collaboration between the V&A and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, was brilliantly achieved and a miracle of compression: just seven operas by seven composers, each work premièred in a major European city, from 1642 to 1934. Not only did this immersive retrospective display operatic history, it ensured it was heard. The catalogue was just as great. In Melbourne, I particularly liked Victorian Opera’s pioneering production of Rossini’s Guillaume Tell (the French version) in its first staging in Australia since 1876 (ABR Arts, 7/18). Bravo to VO’s artistic director and conductor, Richard Mills.

The NGV’s exhibition of works from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was exhaustive and exhausting, but I wouldn’t have missed it for quids.

The cast of William Tell (Victorian Opera)

Zoltán Szabó

It seems incredible that The Nose, a major opera by Dmitri Shostakovich (his first, in fact), only received its Australian première in 2018 (ABR Arts, 2/18). This production marked the first return of Barrie Kosky to Opera Australia in almost twenty years. Are we so rich in talent, one wonders? This was a celebration of boundless artistic imagination; the delights of this grotesque and quirky story and music splendidly brought to the fore by an outrageously grotesque and quirky production.

A very different artistic and truly cathartic experience was on offer in the latest opus by Hungarian film director, Ildikó Enyedi, On Body and Soul (ABR Arts, 5/18). The metaphorically rich, stunning images of a doe and a stag in the snowy forest were an integral part of a tender love story placed in the unlikely and brutal background of a slaughterhouse.

Martin Winkler and the cast of The Nose (Opera Australia)

Diana Simmonds

It’s impossible to go past Sydney Theatre Company’s The Harp in the South as the outstanding theatre production of 2018 (ABR Arts, 8/18). Adapted by Kate Mulvany from Ruth Park’s novels, the two-part epic ran to six hours. The published play calls for a ‘large cast’. Nineteen fine actors portrayed the Irish Catholic family and a muddledom of neighbours across the generations. After the success of The Seed, Medea, and Jasper Jones, Mulvany demonstrates astonishing maturity and confidence with The Harp, capturing its intimacy and sprawl, the colour and shape of characters, and the all-important humour. Assembling a top creative team, STC boss Kip Williams cemented his place as one of the best directors with a production that satisfied in every way.

Jack Ruwald, Anita Hegh, and Jack Finsterer in The Harp in the South (photo by Daniel Boud)

John Allison

‘Must the winter come so soon?’ is something nagging at us all in the northern hemisphere right now, but such thoughts are eased slightly by memories of this aria – the most celebrated music in Samuel Barber’s 1958 opera Vanessa – being sung on a summer evening at Glyndebourne. The first professional British staging of Barber’s wonderful opera was a highlight of the year, thanks not least to Keith Warner’s psychologically probing production.

Many of my other revelations came in Poland, from hearing the inaugural International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments in Warsaw, to finally visiting Katowice’s recently built new concert hall, a stunning addition to Europe’s musical landscape. As Poland celebrates the centenary of regaining statehood, it has been revelatory to hear so much of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the virtuoso pianist–composer who was a signatory to the Treaty of Versailles and an early prime minister of the country. And to see him: Warsaw’s National Museum put on a magnificent show about a figure who will no longer be quite so undervalued.

Ignacy Jan Paderewski, 1920 (photo: Wikipedia Commons)

Leo Schofield

The STC’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South trilogy was one of the ensemble’s most ambitious projects to date and a showcase for some of the country’s finest acting talent, a kind of Cloudstreet redux. At the other end of the theatrical scale, the exuberant Calamity Jane, vaulting from the pocket handkerchief-sized stage of the hundred-seater Hayes Theatre Company to Belvoir St Theatre and beyond, was a blast, proving that there is much to be said for unchallenging entertainment and evenings of pure fun. Virginia Gay’s wildcat performance in the title role was one to treasure forever, alongside another great Aussie star Gloria Dawn in Annie Get Your Gun in a big top on Brookvale Oval.

An initiative of cellist James Beck, the fledgling Sydney Art Quartet performs in the Yellow House, an art gallery in Potts Point. Always original and fresh, their programming hit new heights in September when they gave a joyful recital with guest soloist Erin Helyard. Playing first on harpsichord and later on fortepiano. Helyard is not only a noted musicologist and conductor but also a performer with the rare talent of engaging fully with his audience and charming the socks off ’em.

Virginia Gay in Calamity Jane (photo by John McRae)

Peter Craven

The best piece of theatre I saw this year and the greatest feat of acting was, by a long shot, Barry McGovern’s adaptation and one-man dramatisation of Samuel Beckett’s Watt (ABR Arts, 10/18). It had an absolutely unshowy precision through every wry desolation of a joke, a comical brilliance that was also poignant.

In music, what could touch the great Anne-Sophie Mutter, that transcendent violinist, doing the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Andrew Davis and the MSO (ABR Arts, 6/18). It was also marvellous to see Thomas Hampson, a baritone where musicianship and a sense of drama meet and fuse, performing Mahler’s Song of the Wayfarer: a princely performance in every sense.

And my film? Lady Bird, written and directed by Greta Gerwig, and featuring Saoirse Ronan. Such freshness and sap and that rare apparitional thing of recognising something you had never quite seen on a screen before.

Anne-Sophie Mutter

Tali Lavi

In the ABC’s Mystery Road, the East Kimberley was revealed as a glorious embodiment of Country. Much of the power of this mesmerising television series, directed by Rachel Perkins, resides in what is repressed or unsaid. Aaron Pedersen’s masterful portrait of a flawed hero – enigmatic, wry, seething – and his nuanced interplay with Judy Davis make for unmissable viewing.

A revival of Thyestes (The Hayloft Project/Adelaide Festival) left me feeling cowed by its roar of violence and misogyny (ABR Arts, 3/18). Part of its disturbing nature was the sense of audience complicity as its humour plumbed the depths and laughter could still be heard.

Samuel Maoz’s masterpiece Foxtrot (ABR Arts, 6/18) was a sublime portrait of grief with elements of comic surrealism. Lior Ashkenazi and Sarah Adler were luminous as grieving parents. The question it poses – how does one live in the face of so much pain? – was encountered with a pulsating humanity.

A still from Foxtrot (Sharmill Films)

Paul Kildea

Five works dating from 1996 to 2014 and performed in a Portrait Concert at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music put the unrestrained imagination of Liza Lim on stage. My favourite – The Alchemical Wedding – brings together different musical and philosophical traditions amid much whirring and clanking and sheer virtuosity.

I could not attend the performance, but the final rehearsal of Siobhan Stagg singing Strauss with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (at the Melbourne Recital Centre) under Johannes Fritz was exquisite. The orchestral playing was superb, Fritz an inspiring leader, Stagg simply radiant. A similar radiance is to be experienced at The Brunswick Green in Melbourne where each Thursday night Michelle Nicolle performs with her band. She really is an astonishing artist, fielding jazz requests with grace and an impossibly good memory. And what a voice!

David Greco and Erin Helyard launched their brilliant new recording of Schubert’s Winterreise with an inspiring presentation in which they discussed their many startling departures from the received traditions associated with this cycle.

 Promotion image of Siobhan Stagg

Patrick McCaughey

Three exhibitions changed the landscape in their respective fields. The National Museum’s Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters was the most exhilarating and instructive exhibition of Aboriginal art I have ever seen. The exhibition conveyed in nuce the journey across the landscape and the cosmogony that shaped it. The Metropolitan’s bold experiment to show and talk about modern art differently in Met Breuer (the old Whitney building) has given us profound exhibitions, none more than Like Life: Sculpture, Colour and the Body, 1300–Now. The excitement comes from the shock of juxtaposing ancient and modern. Jeff Koons’s sad Buster Keaton on a pony next to a fifteenth-century German polychrome carving of Christ on a Donkey was beyond riveting: it was piercing. Delacroix has taken over the Met this fall. Never have I seen him portrayed in such impassioned terms. André Breton’s ‘beauty must be convulsive’ could be the exhibition’s epigraph.

Hunting Ground, by Martumili Art Studio, part of the Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters exhibition (photo via National Museum of Australia)

Susan Lever

The year began with sell-out performances of the marvellous musical version of Muriel’s Wedding (ABR Arts, 11/17). The Hayes Theatre Company’s delightful revival of Katherine Thomson and Max Lambert’s Darlinghurst Nights in January reminds us that there are other good Australian musicals in the repertoire, if we could only keep them in production. For Opera Australia, Barrie Kosky’s production of The Nose pushed Shostakovich’s absurd and wayward material to its hilarious theatrical limits.

Later in the year, two art exhibitions were thoughtfully curated and full of beautiful work. The retrospective of John Mawurndjul’s work at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art (I Am the Old and the New) was a revelation, full of masterpieces from this modest and prolific artist. At the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the John Russell retrospective displayed his rarely seen work with companion pieces from his more famous friends (ABR Arts, 7/18). A complementary pleasure was a trip across the harbour to see Luke Sciberras and Ewan Macleod’s paintings of Belle Isle, organised as a tribute to Russell by the Manly Art Gallery.

Mrs Russell among the flowers in the garden of Goulphar Belle Île 1907, by John Russell. Musée dOrsay Paris, held by the Musée de Morlaix bequest of Mme Jouve, 1948

Peter Tregear

One standout for me was Melbourne Opera’s Tristan und Isolde (ABR Arts, 2/18). A supreme creative achievement of Western culture, Wagner’s opera is exceedingly difficult to perform. The fact that a local company was able to do so without drawing on any public subsidy belies those who might otherwise wish to claim that this art form neither comes from, nor addresses, modern Australia.

Ladies in Black – Bruce Beresford’s cinematic adaptation of Madeleine St John’s novel – evokes a late-1950s Australia where a profound lack of aesthetic experiences and imagination was the expected norm. Nominally a film about women and dresses, it is in fact as much about men and music and food and drink and sex, and the liberating impact made by a group of Hungarian wartime immigrants who knew about them all.

Julia Ormond as Magda Szombatheli in Ladies in Black

Ben Brooker

It’s often the shows I don’t have to write about that I enjoy the most – coincidence perhaps, or the result of being ‘off duty’. There were two such productions for me this year: MTC’s searing The House of Bernarda Alba, adapted by Patricia Cornelius from Federico García Lorca’s classic tragedy; and Chamber Made Opera’s unsettling theatrical exorcism Dybbuks at Theatre Works. With exceptional casts and creative teams dominated by women, both were spooky, fiercely political evocations of patriarchy and its spectres. Also of note were two musical experiences: Melbourne Film Festival’s stunning 4K presentation of Prince’s 1987 concert film Sign o’ the Times – a reminder of the Purple One’s much-missed genius – and famed choral ensemble Rundfunkchor Berlin’s immersive and deeply affecting Human Requiem, a ‘broadening’ of Brahms’s German Requiem that proved revelatory in its democratising intermingling of choristers and audience.

The cast of Chamber Made Opera's Dybbuks at Theatre Works (photo by Pia Johnson)

Tim Byrne

This year saw a resurgent Victorian Opera stage two superb productions – one a concert performance of Bellini’s The Capulets and the Montagues, with a predictably virtuosic Jessica Pratt and a stunning Caitlin Hulcup, and the other a fully realised triumph in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell. These works’ rarity only increased their appeal.

Two towering solo performances stuck in the memory: Colin Friels at his most exposed and generous in Scaramouche Jones (ABR Arts, 8/18) and Barry McGovern in complete control of the Beckett world view in Watt.

The finest, most surprising work of the year was Stephanie Lake’s Colossus for the Melbourne Fringe. With a cast of fifty dancers on the tiny Fairfax stage, this surging, multifarious piece managed to be both expansively political and almost microscopically intimate. With this sumptuous and thorny masterpiece, Lake has cemented herself at the heart of Australian dance.

Colin Friels in Scaramouche Jones at Arts Centre Melbourne (photo by Lachlan Bryan)

Fiona Gruber

The Sydney White Rabbit Gallery mounts impeccably produced shows of contemporary Chinese artists. I relished The Sleeper Awakes in March. Taking its title from the H.G. Wells novel, this group show imagines waking in China forty years after the death of Mao Zedong to find his vision strangely distorted. It was deliciously witty, subversive, and lyrical, with immaculately realised works. In May, I visited Manifesta, Europe’s roving biennale; this year it is in Palermo, with work centred on the three hot topics of our times: migration, the environment, and digital surveillance. Sicily has been at the crossroads of Africa and Europe for millennia. With Manifesta, life, history, and urgent contemporary art combined brilliantly.

Finally, at this year’s Melbourne Festival, it was a treat to see the Belarus Free Theatre work with local actors to create a searing show about cultural identity. Trustees was exhilaratingly daring. Bravo!

Daniel Schlusser and Tammy Anderson in Trustees by Belarus Free Theatre (photo by Nicolai Khalezin)

Barney Zwartz

Shostakovich provided my finest musical moments of 2018. Opera Australia gave us his satirical opera, The Nose. Wildly inventive and anarchic, it has been described as an operatic Monty Python; Barrie Kosky’s production, conducted by Andrea Molino, realised this ingeniously. In September, I was lucky to be in Chicago for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s opening concert of the 2018–19 season: Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar. Built around five Yevgeny Yevtushenko poems with basso profundo (Alexey Tikhomirov) and male chorus, it is one of the great masterpieces of political protest. Riccardo Muti drew an anguished, tender performance.

Close behind was Victorian Opera’s sublime account of Debussy’s haunting Pelléas et Mélisande, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s concert performance of Act One of Wagner’s Die Walküre (ABR Arts, 8/18), while Melbourne Opera punched wildly above its weight with a fine Tristan und Isolde. Honourable mentions: OA’s Don Quichotte, starring Ferrucio Furlanetto (ABR Arts, 3/18) and the MSO’s The Dream of Gerontius, with Stuart Skelton (ABR Arts, 3/18)

Warwick Fyfe as Sancho Panza and the chorus in Opera Australia's production of Don Quichotte (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Peter Rose

In a year of debased politics around the world, galleries and theatre of all kinds remained a refuge for illumination, brio, and liberal values. Three operas stood out: the Met’s revival of Mary Zimmerman’s stylish production of Lucia di Lammermoor (ABR Arts, 5/18), with Pretty Yende and Michael Fabiano as Donizetti’s demented lovers; WASO’s concert version of Tristan und Isolde, with the phenomenal Stuart Skelton and a sensational stand-in, Gun-Brit Barkmin; and the Australian première of Brett Dean’s Hamlet, even better than the 2017 Glyndebourne performance. Paul Lewis, that most probing and elegant of pianists, continued his revelatory series of Haydn and Brahms recitals. Anne-Sophie Mutter, in her Melbourne début, gave one of the great performances of the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto.

Theatrically, Barry McGovern was hilarious and tragic and suave in his adaptation of Beckett’s Watt. But the performance that stirred me most was the revival of Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women (ABR Arts, 4/18), with the incomparable Glenda Jackson.

Glenda Jackson in Three Tall Women

Ron Radford

It was pleasing to see no fewer than four Australian colonial exhibitions in 2018, given that there have only been fifteen such shows in the thirty years since the Bicentenary. The Art Gallery of Ballarat showed the brilliant Eugene von Guérard as a great travelling artist and displayed, for the first time, his lively on-the-spot drawings with his oils. Next, an exhibition of convict portraitist Thomas Bock opened in his birthplace, Birmingham, then Hobart. It excluded his oils, concentrating on his uniquely individual Aboriginal portraits. The third show, opening at the National Gallery of Australia, displayed Aboriginal images by Bock and other artists. It centred on Benjamin Duterrau’s The Conciliation, which he called ‘the national picture’. The fourth and most ambitious was the National Gallery of Victoria’s huge survey Colony: Australia 1770–1861 (ABR Arts, 4/18). Incomprehensively displayed, it was a noble but cluttered failure compared with the more focused shows. It is to be hoped these exhibitions herald a trend in honouring our visual arts heritage.

John Glover, The River Nile, Van Diemen's Land, from Mr Glover's farm, 1837 (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Felton Bequest, 1956)

Will Yeoman

It was a rich year for West Australian art lovers. There were the chthonic, textured evocations of the Pilbara and Kimberley landscapes encapsulated by trios of quasi-anthropomorphic vessels in Fragment, Stewart Scambler’s superb exhibition at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery; but also the Renaissance and Baroque splendours of Caravaggio, Guercino, Pontormo et al. in A Window on Italy – The Corsini Collection: Masterpieces from Florence at the Art Gallery of Western Australia (ABR Arts, 2/18).

Musically, the highlight was undoubtedly WASO’s concert performance of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, conducted by Asher Fisch and featuring the incomparable Stuart Skelton. I also enjoyed Black Swan State Theatre Company’s productions of Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (ABR Arts, 5/18) and Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (ABR Arts, 6/18), while Perth Festival’s presentations of Evgeny Grishkovets’s Farewell to Paper and Yeung Fai’s Hand Stories offered contrasting yet similarly elegiac views on culture, history, tradition, and innovation. Joe Stephenson’s wonderful documentary on Ian McKellen, Playing the Part, was the icing on the cake.

Kelton Pell, Amy Mathews, and Jacob Allan in Black Swan State Theatre Companys Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (photo by Philip Gostelow)

Gillian Wills

In April, the twenty-five-year-old Alexander Prior conducted the Queensland Symphony Orchestra as if it were a massive piano, in a brilliant concert of music by Brahms, Debussy, and Ginastera. Prior’s gift for shaping the micro was balanced by an unusually luxurious overarching coherence. Also in April, as part of the Wave Festival, Gordon Hamilton’s arrangements of Horrorshow hits from albums Bardo State and The Grey Place celebrated the versatility of Queensland Symphony Orchestra instrumentalists and the Hip-Hop collective. In this blend of Hip Hop and Classical, bassist Paul O’Brien mapped out jazzy grooves as skilfully as he underpins QSO’s classical works. Esther Hannaford was riveting as Carole King in Beautiful, presented by QPAC in July. Polished, authentic, funny, with stylised dance routines recalling The Shirelles. Beautiful, delighted the audience. King and Gerry Goffin’s chart-toppers were belted with infectious authority. Southern Cross Soloists’ stunning August concert, Star of the Concertgebouw, featured Principal Trumpeter Miroslav Petkov.

Miroslav Petkov, Principal Trumpeter of The Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam

Ian Dickson

Opera Australia has often been accused of playing safe and rehashing the same repertoire, but with its co-production of Dmitri Shostakovitch’s The Nose it not only struck out, it struck gold. Barrie Kosky’s wildly inventive, hilarious production was matched by Andrea Molino’s incisive conducting and a superb cast led by Martin Winkler.

The STC is developing a rapport with the ambitious and challenging British playwright Lucy Kirkwood. Sarah Goodes’s production of Kirkwood’s post-apocalyptic play The Children (ABR Arts, 4/18) cleverly balanced the humour and horror of the piece, ably abetted by her magnificent trio of actors, Pamela Rabe, William Zappa, and Sarah Peirse. Can we hope for Kirkwood’s latest play, Mosquitoes, in the future?

Small in scale and light in touch it may be, but Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black is an absolute delight. The cast is perfect: unfair though it is to single out anyone, the gorgeous Angourie Rice as the protagonist, Leslie, who blossoms into Lisa, must be mentioned.

William Zappa and Pamela Rabe in The Children (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Kim Williams

The highlights of the past year have been two Adelaide Festival productions: Neil Armfield’s gripping production of Brett Dean’s magical opera Hamlet (ABR Arts, 3/18), with a stunning performance by Allan Clayton as the Prince. Also at the Festival was Belgian genius Ivo van Hove’s breathtaking Kings of War, his Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s melding of Shakespeare’s Henry V, Henry VI, and Richard III into a play that went to the heart of leadership and the polarities and venalities attaching to it. This memorable, singular piece of theatre integrated video and live action perfectly with impeccable theatrical purpose. Another wondrous night was at the National Theatre in London with another Ivo van Hove piece – his recreation of Paddy Chayefsky’s Network, with Bryan Cranston in the central role as Howard (‘I’m mad as hell’) Beale. In a year of theatrical marvels, Kate Mulvany’s adaptation of Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South trilogy was a theatrical highlight that touched the heart and mind indelibly.

Mary Finsterer’s The Lost: Missed Tales No. 3, for the MSO (self-confession: I commissioned it), the Canadian baroque ensemble Tafelmusik, and Ross Edwards’s various seventy-fifth anniversary performances rounded out the year with some wonderful music.

Allan Clayton in Hamlet at the 2018 Adelaide Festival photograph (photo by Tony Lewis)

Lee Christofis

Three timely and absorbing dance dramas exploring invasion, colonisation, and the dragooning of Indigenous peoples into indentured labour or wars were this year’s dance highlights. Starry nights at Perth’s Quarry were perfect for Milky Way: Ballet at the Quarry (ABR Arts, 2/18), a meditation on the apotheosis of restless souls. Gary Lang. Deborah Cheetham, a Yorta Yorta woman, superbly enhanced Milky Way’s mystery, singing Henryk Gørecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs to a WASO recording. Xenos, a haunting critique of the British Raj and the conscription of native men into wars they could never comprehend, was exquisitely crafted by Bangladeshi-British choreographer Akram Khan to mark his retirement from the stage (ABR Arts, 3/18). More contemporary, and pressing, was Marrugeku Dance Theatre’s Le Dernier Appel (The Last Cry), a multiracial, cross-art-form psychodrama, which explored New Caledonia’s Kanak people’s current yearning for liberation from around 180 years of French colonialism (ABR Arts, 8/18).

Performers of Marrugeku Dance Theatre's Le Dernier Appel (photo by Prudence Upton)

Brian McFarlane

Perhaps the film that lingers most painfully in the memory is the Russian drama Loveless (ABR Arts, 4/18). Few films maintain such a steely grip on the viewer’s involvement as it traces the disappearance of a child of divorcing – and solipsistic – parents. Andrey Zvyagintsev’s rigorous direction of a tragic story at odds with the luminous beauty of the landscape asks a great deal of audiences, and offers a great deal in return. There is pain of a different kind to respond to in Dominic Cooke’s version of On Chesil Beach, scripted by its author, Ian McEwan, evoking a period of sexual inhibition, but convincingly arriving at a muted yet affecting outcome (ABR Arts, 10/17). Bruce Beresford’s Ladies in Black, a witty, humane version of Madeleine St John’s novel, captures the time and place and interweaves several personal stories with larger social changes. The result is a kindly but never sentimental piece of recreation.

Matvey Novikov in Loveless

Michael Halliwell

Three very different operas were my highlights of the year. Firstly, a musically ravishing Parsifal as part of the Bavarian State Opera Festival (ABR Arts, 7/18). While the production was inconsistent, it was probably the most complete musical performance of this monumental work I have experienced, with the dream casting of Jonas Kaufmann as Parsifal and Nina Stemme as Kundry. Another standard repertoire opera, La Traviata, was a landmark event, not so much for the production or overall performance, but for the outstanding role début of rising Australian star Nicole Car in the challenging title role (ABR Arts, 3/18). Finally, a welcome revival of Brian Howard’s Metamorphosis (ABR Arts, 9/18) suggested that Opera Australia are looking at reviving neglected Australian operas in exciting venues – in this case in the Surry Hills Workshops of the company.

Simon Lobelson in Opera Australia's 2018 production of Metamorphosis at The Opera Centre Scenery Workshop

Sophie Knezic

The ascendancy of sound art as a medium of urgent exploration by contemporary artists was evident in several Melbourne exhibitions. Sensitively curated and politically astute was Joel Stern and James Parker’s Eavesdropping: a purview into the legislative complexities of listening and overhearing, whose highlights included works by artists associated with the London-based research agency Forensic Architecture. The potency of sound was also probed by David Chesworth and Sonia Leber in their mid-career survey show Architecture Makes Us, now interwoven with the nature of time and obsolescence. A suite of alluring works included Myriad Falls (2017), a slick pseudo-corporate video exposing the mechanisms of analogue wristwatch maintenance filmed inside a horologist’s workshop. Both exhibitions scrutinised the ways in which – mostly beneath our threshold of general awareness – sounds, especially private ones, can be extracted, co-opted, and surveilled.

Susan Schuppli, Listening to Answering Machines, 2018, from Eavesdropping at the Ian Potter Museum of Art (photo by Christian Capurro)

Michael Morley

Nothing has left as haunting an impact as Jochen Sandig and Sascha Waltz’s reimagining, with Rundfunkchor Berlin, of Brahms’s German Requiem as Human Requiem. At the other end of the musical and theatrical scale was the Hayes Theatre’s exhilarating, knockabout production of Calamity Jane, as if Peter Brook’s ideas on ‘rough theatre’ had been applied to the Hollywood musical.

Acting performances of the year were all on television. With Benedict Cumberbatch as the eponymous anti-hero, the final episode of Patrick Melrose spoke of ‘contempt, pity, rage, terror, tenderness’. Cumberbatch’s performance had all these and more. In A Very English Scandal (BBC First) we had Hugh Grant’s brilliant turn as the UK politician Jeremy Thorpe, matched by Ben Whishaw as his erstwhile lover and nemesis, Norman Scott. This series was television at its best. Perhaps the ABC could divert funds from Gulfstream or Jetboat for a repeat screening?

Hugh Grant as Jeremy Thorpe and Ben Whishaw as Norman Scott in A Very English Scandal (photo by BBC/Blueprint Television)

When Clare Wright’s new history, You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians who won the vote and inspired the world, landed in my mailbox, I opened it with some trepidation. It was big, a fact I now realise I should have expected but nevertheless a somewhat disheartening one – arriving as it did at the beginning of our lambing season on the farm. It sat on the kitchen table, slightly out of place beside tractor catalogues, long-term rainfall predictions (depressing), and pamphlets advertising ram sales.

If the past is a foreign country, the distant past is a very foreign one indeed. Tim Flannery’s new book takes us deep into the prehistory of Europe. Climbing aboard the time machine that he repeatedly invites us to use, we glimpse pygmy dinosaurs and terrifying terminator pigs the size of cows. We meet, on the island of Gargano in what is now southern Italy, a giant carnivorous hedgehog. Later, we learn of hippos in the Thames and woolly rhinos in Scotland, encounter a cobra in ancient Hungary and a small ape in what is now Tuscany. For much of the past hundred million years, the climate of the zone we call Europe was tropical or semi-tropical. Huge straight-tusked elephants wandered the continent, their dwarf descendants (only one metre tall) surviving in Cyprus until about 11,000 years ago. Europe’s natural history turns out to be dramatic, yet on timescales that are hard for most of us to absorb.

ABR Patrons’ Fellowship

Following the success of the Fortieth Birthday Fellowship, we welcome applications for the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellowship, which is also worth $10,000.

Like the current Fellowship, held by Beejay Silcox, the new one is unthemed. We are not seeking a single, lengthy essay; rather, we are looking for a sustained contribution to the magazine throughout the year – the kind of nuanced, engaging journalism that Beejay Silcox has brought to ABR. We seek proposals from Australian critics, commentators, and scholars for four substantial contributions to the magazine: review essays, commentaries, and/or interviews. All our ABR Fellows enjoy a special status at the magazine, and this suite of contributions will be a highlight of our publishing year.

Full information about the new Fellowship can be found here. As always, those interested in applying are encouraged to sound out the Editor, Peter Rose (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) beforehand.

Applications close on 10 December 2018. The Fellow will be named in early 2019.

The Fellowship is funded by the ABR Patrons; all of whom are gratefully acknowledged.

Meanwhile, in the new November Arts issue, Beejay Silcox reflects on trauma fiction in her article titled ‘The Art of Pain: Writing in the Age of Trauma’.

Arts Highlights

We know that our readers, like the ABR editors, love this time of year, when a range of experts nominate their favourite productions and publications, often pointing us to works we have somehow overlooked.

In the 2018 ABR Highlights of the Year, twenty-nine critics and arts professionals nominate some of the 2018 plays, films, operas, concerts, television, dance, and exhibitions they found most successful. Our critics include Anwen Crawford, Paul Kildea, and Gabriella Coslovich.

Elsewhere in this issue, Ms Coslovich, in her ABR début, examines a major new book on Australian culture and the tyranny of measurability. What Matters? Talking value in Australian culture (Monash University Publishing) is written by Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett – all at Flinders University. In her review, Gabriella Coslovich asks: ‘What do [numbers] tell us about the exhibition itself? … Its effect on civic well-being? Nothing.’ Her own book, Whiteley on Trial (reviewed by Johanna Leggatt in our November 2017 issue), has won the 2018 Walkley Arts Journalism Award.

Meanwhile, Paul Kildea – musician, conductor, Benjamin Britten’s biographer, and author of the new book on Chopin’s Piano – reviews Stephen Walsh’s biography of Claude Debussy, a substantial contribution to the Debussy centenary.

Meanwhile, nominations for our ‘Books of the Year’ feature are starting to arrive, with the usual broad range of approbations. Join us in December to find out what people like Andrea Goldsmith, Felicity Plunkett, Glyn Davis, and Frank Bongiorno consider the most successful and enjoyable books of the year.

Prime Minister’s Literary Awards

The shortlists for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Awards have been announced. The Awards recognise Australia’s literary talent across six categories: fiction, non-fiction, Australian history, young adult literature, children’s literature, and poetry. Shortlisted for the Fiction Award are: Peter Carey (A Long Way from Home), Richard Flanagan (First Person), Michelle de Kretser (The Life to Come), Gerald Murnane (Border Districts), and Kim Scott (Taboo).

The non-fiction shortlist comprises: Jelena Dokic and Jessica Halloran (Unbreakable), Sheila Fitzpatrick (Mischa’s War: A European odyssey of the 1940s), Stuart Kells (The Library: A catalogue of wonders) Richard McGregor (Asia’s Reckoning), and Chris Masters (No Front Line: Australia’s special forces at war in Afghanistan).

The winners in each category will receive $80,000 and the shortlisted writers will each receive $5,000. All prizes are tax-free. The results will be announced later this year.

Collected Works

Kris Kemensley at an ABR function at the Collected Works Bookshop, October 2017The loss of a great bookshop reverberates like the felling of an immense gum tree or the death of a beloved canine. Where will be go on our walks now? Especially along Swanston Street.

Collected Works, which will cease trading at the end of November, is a precious resource for poetry lovers. First based in Collingwood, it moved to the Nicholas Building on Swanston Street many years ago. Kris Hemensley, a noted poet himself, has owned and managed it with his partner, Retta. Together they have subsidised the business for years. Hemensley told Fairfax: ‘The pincers of the internet and real estate affect all small business, even though we don’t have a business imperative.’

Kris and Retta’s legendary goodwill, generosity, and ready welcome are hugely appreciated in the literary community.

Melbourne Prize for Literature

The finalists have been announced for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature. The $60,000 Prize is awarded triennially to a Victorian author whose body of published work has made an outstanding contribution to Australian literature and to cultural and intellectual life. This year’s finalists are Tony Birch, Gideon Haigh, Alison Lester, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright.

The finalists for the Readings Residency Award (worth $7,500) and the Best Writing Award (worth $30,000) have also been announced and can be found on the Melbourne Prize website.

The winners of all three prizes will be announced on November 14, while a free public exhibition of the finalists’ work will be held at Melbourne’s Federation Square from 12 to 26 November.

Voting is now open for the Civic Choice Award (worth $4,000). The winner will be announced on November 30. Voting is open to the public. Visit www.melbourneprize.org/vote/ to cast your vote.

Homer galore

Sigrid Thornton, Melodie Reynolds, and Kate Kendall.

Doing anything for twelve hours on December 1? If not, drop in to the free reading of Homer’s Odyssey at MPavilion in the Queen Victoria Gardens opposite Arts Centre Melbourne. Melbourne’s Stork Theatre is presenting this marathon, which Helen Madden describes as ‘twelve hours of heroes, gods, ogres, lovers, and a cruel sea’. Twenty-four ‘prominent Melburnians’ will read all 12,000 lines from this inimitable epic poem. They include Sigrid Thornton and Magda Szubanski.

In next month’s issue, Marguerite Johnson – Professor of Classics at the University of Newcastle – reviews two new translations for Homer, including Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey, published by Wiley.

Jennifer Down

Jennifer DownCongratulations to 2014 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize winner Jennifer Down on winning the 2018 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction (worth $3,000) for her short story collection Pulse Points. Susan Midalia reviewed Pulse Points, Down’s second work of fiction, in our September 2017 issue; she described it as a ‘wonderful début collection’ and noted that ‘Down’s stories are alive with psychological acuity and technical dexterity’. Down’s Jolley Prize-winning storey, ‘Aokigahara’, appears in Pulse Points.

Prizes galore

Thanks to those early birds who have already entered the Peter Porter Poetry Prize and the Calibre Essay Prize, our two current literary competitions. The Porter, worth a total of $8,500, closes on December 3. Calibre, worth a total of $7,500, closes on January 14.

Just a reminder, the Calibre judges – J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose – welcome non-fiction essays of all kinds, regardless of subject matter.

Film tickets

The Old Man & the Gun, directed by Robert RedfordThis month, thanks to Entertainment One, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Robert Redford’s new film, The Old Man & the Gun (not written by Ernest Hemingway), which will be in cinemas from November 15. Announced as Redford’s final on-screen performance, The Old Man & the Gun was inspired by the true story of career criminal Forrest Tucker who, rather inspiredly, broke out of prison seventeen times. It opens with the now seventy-year-old Tucker’s seventeenth successful escape. The film also stars Sissy Spacek and Casey Affleck. To be in the running please email Grace Chang at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. with your full name and contact details.

Correction

How could we misdate Black Saturday, that unforgettable day for anyone living in Victoria at the time? Somehow we did, in Fiona Gruber’s review of Chloe Hooper’s new book on Black Saturday, The Arsonist (ABR, October 2018). The Black Saturday bushfires occurred in February 2009, not September 2009.

Gillian Triggs is a pearls-and-perfectly-cut-jacket person these days, so it is thrilling to learn that she was dressed head to toe in motorcycle leathers when she had one of the more instructive experiences of her life. It was 1972, and Triggs, the future president of the Australian Human Rights Commission, was in the United States working as a legal adviser at the Dallas Police Department. She and a colleague took a motorbike trip through rural Wisconsin, twenty-six-year-old Triggs riding pillion as they sped through forests and open countryside. When they pulled into a backblocks petrol station, the attendant took one look at them and refused to fill their tank. ‘I remember vividly the shock of realising that we were not welcome and, worse, we could not refuel,’ Triggs writes in Speaking Up. She adds that her colleague was less surprised. ‘He was a black American.’

In my childhood home, Yiddish prompted a frisson of the suppressed. This was a direct consequence of adults speaking it whenever they did not want us children to understand. Yiddish was the language in which jokes, clever and sometimes ribald, worked. When attempting to translate, inevitably my grandmother would shrug; English was found lacking. Yiddish dimpled our conversations, and the foods that bore Yiddish names dimpled our knees. Its phrases and expressions were expressive, mournful, joyful. Yiddish was as changeable as it was myriad in composition; a melange of German, Hebrew, and other European languages.

Margaret Taft and Andrew Markus’s study of Yiddish Melbourne follows Markus and Danielle Charak’s earlier foray into the subject as editors of the fascinating Yiddish Melbourne: Towards a history (2008). A Second Chance: The making of  Yiddish Melbourne is a detailed study of a community of Eastern European Jewish migrants who arrived in two successive waves; the greatest number of them settled in Melbourne. Initial arrivals were in the 1920s and 1930s, a time of white monoculture. The second wave were Holocaust survivors, predominantly Polish. This migrant community is familiar to readers of the stories of Arnold Zable, Jacob G. Rosenberg, and Lily Brett, or to those who lived alongside them in neighbourhoods that encompassed Carlton, Northcote, and St Kilda.

A Second Chance charts the growth of this community while identifying shifts in Australia. The changing landscape of immigration legislation and public attitudes toward the migrants is explored alongside international developments, with close reference to the rising tides of anti-Semitism in Europe, the Holocaust, and the establishment of the State of Israel. It observes most extensively the decades fron the 1920s through to the 1960s, with its closing chapter contemplating whether Yiddish is in its death throes, as suggested by UNESCO’s categorisation of it as a ‘definitely endangered’ global language.

The state of the language’s usage, while relevant, is not at the heart of this work. As Taft and Markus convincingly argue, Yiddish was not merely a language but a way of life, a means of expressing a robust, vibrant cultural identity. Carlton was its beating heart and the Kadimah (Hebrew for ‘Forward’), a library and cultural centre, was its pumping chambers. While nostalgia held currency, charismatic leaders embraced ‘progressive think[ing]’ and are described as ‘disruptors’ and ‘radicals’. On arrival, these migrants embarrassed the established Jewish community. Unlike their English and Australian-accented counterparts who embraced the idea of ‘blending in’, the newcomers – who ‘had lived full cultural Yiddish lives in large cities in which high visibility was not only the social norm but a badge of honour’ – were ‘noisy north of the Yarra’  Jews. Chutzpah was a distinctly un-Anglo quality.

A group of new arrivals with David Abzac centre, Fremantle, Western Australia, late 1940s

While reading A Second Chance, identifiable echoes and patterns in contemporary immigration debates appear. Anti-Semitism surfaced with the immigrants’ arrivals, and vile tropes appeared in the media and in politics. However, Australian anti-Semitism did not amount to pogroms or attempts at mass extermination, and migrants often experienced a friendliness in personal encounters with Australians. Insert any successive migrant community into this formula and the pattern is clear; Australia isn’t in the habit of extending a warm embrace to foreigners, particularly if they can’t speak English. The current migrant population experiencing this disfavour are the Sudanese, who don’t have the liberty of ‘blending in’. One of this book’s contentions is that the establishment of Yiddish-speaking enclaves fostered a thriving community and made fertile ground for a dynamic culture that further infused the wider Australian community. Detractors of multiculturalism might do well to reflect on this.

Successful integration and support were orchestrated by Jewish organisations. Skilful self-governance was born from persecution in Europe. The Jewish Welcome Society, established in 1922, was extraordinary. ‘[Its] task was to meet every ship, to find work and accommodation for the new arrivals (a course for learning basic English was also organised) and in general to make the new immigrant who has no one to look after him a little more at home.’ It would be a fine contemporary model for other immigrant and refugee communities given that the national record is not one of magnanimity. While the intake of Jewish refugees increased after the Holocaust, they did not receive any assistance from the Australian government, instead relying on Jewish organisations and the munificence of exceptional individuals.

Because the subjects are Jewish, this is a story marked by argument. Yiddishists, with their love of language and intellectual engagement, held varying philosophical positions regarding religion and Zionism, although dissent about the latter reduced after the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The Bund, a political secular socialist organisation, was active and often clashed with those who were Zionists.

Former Labor Party leader Arthur Calwell speaking at the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Bund at the Bailystoker Centre, October, 1947

In its heyday, this community supported two Yiddish schools, two Yiddish newspapers, and numerous publications. Notes of wistfulness appear: ‘Literature and theatre were not just superficial indulgences or optional extras, but the life-blood of their existence.’ Cases abound to support this declaration. The Australian première of the Yiddish play The Dybbuk was performed in 1938 in front of a capacity audience of fifteen hundred at the Princess Theatre in Spring Street. This was not provincial amateurism; modernism and cutting-edge theatre techniques like the Stanislavsky Method were employed. Practitioners shaping the theatrical landscape included Yankev Waislitz, founder of the modernist Vilna Troupe, and Rachel Holzer, an internationally renowned Yiddish actress who toured her one-woman shows. This radical spirit lasted until the Holocaust. Thereafter, the taste changed; theatregoing was a bittersweet way to re-experience a former home and family that was no more.

Given the book’s interest in the arts, there is surprisingly no mention of Gilgul Theatre. Founded by Barrie Kosky, this ground-breaking company operated in the 1990s and won Kosky two Victorian Green Room awards for The Dybbuk. Theatre academic and former member Yoni Prior has written about its position as ‘ghetto theatre’, its use of Yiddish songs, and its blend of historical tropes. Gilgul was a return to the days of a revolutionary Yiddish theatre of breathtaking chutzpah.

A Second Chance’s closing depicts the dwindling energy of the Yiddish community. Its final chapter covers an extensive timeframe, stretching from 1967 to the present day. An additional section might have acknowledged home-grown developments. The Bashevis Singers – their name a homage to Nobel Prize-winning Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer – sing gorgeous melodies, both old and new, in Yiddish. The musicians Evie and Husky Gawenda and Gideon Preiss are relations of Michael Gawenda, former editor of The Age, who mentions them in the book’s preface. The unabashedly and exuberantly named YID! (‘Jew’ in Yiddish) is another music sensation which recently played at WOMADelaide and toured internationally. Gloriously carnivalesque, this twenty-two-piece band incorporates Yiddish spoken word, shtetl sounds foregrounding those of jazz and big band. Yiddish Melbourne might require a new instalment.

Clementine Ford’s Boys Will Be Boys is a timely contribution to feminist literature. Her central point is clear and confronting, and it represents something of a challenge. Ford writes, ‘everyone’s afraid that their daughters might be hurt. No one seems to be scared that their sons might be the ones to do it.’

The book makes the case for a change in how we raise both boys and girls, since how we are currently going about it – conditioning boys to expect a life of entitlement and privilege over their female and non-binary peers – is harmful to all of our children, regardless of their gender or sexual preference. Ford inverts the phrase ‘boys will be boys’. She explains how such an attitude, and others like ‘boys don’t cry’, puts emotional straitjackets on boys by prescribing only one version of masculinity, rather than allowing children to develop their own identity. This argument, this call for change, is Ford at her best.

In 1901 the cultural Zionist Israel Zangwill, borrowing a phrase from Lord Shaftesbury, declared, ‘Palestine is a country without a people, the Jews are a people without a country.’ That cliché has continued to influence the impasse in the Middle East for almost a century.

Advocates for Israel’s policies seem to relish rehearsing the notion that the Palestinians have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. In this version of history, Palestinians were offered statehood in the proposed partition of 1939, by the United Nations in 1947, in 1979 during the Egypt–Israel peace negotiations, the Oslo agreement in the 1990s, by Prime Minister Ehud Barak in 2000, and by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in 2008. Accordingly, Palestinians have refused the offer to dismantle settlements, the reclamation of East Jerusalem, and sovereignty over religious sites and proposed withdrawals from Gaza and the West Bank. For Palestinians, the missed opportunities are the consequence of Israel’s bad faith during a catalogue of failed negotiations.

The calculated development of Jewish settlements in the West Bank certainly makes one doubt Israel’s commitment to peace. So, too, do the checkpoints, constant military presence, and the harassment. Palestinian aspirations to self-determination have evolved from the demand for the right of return to a two-state solution with a return to pre-1967 borders. Agreement in this region is rare, but public opinion polls on the two-state solution suggest that most people support the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and an end to the occupation. Anshel Pfeffer’s biography suggests that Israel’s leadership from Ben Gurion onwards has vacillated between ambivalence and hostility regarding any real progress towards peace. This is a fascinating, albeit deeply depressing account of Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarkable political long- evity (prime minister since 2009, he also held the position from 1996 to 1999). To understand his staying power, Pfeffer revisits the political leadership that preceded him to discover the themes that shaped his prime ministership.

Netanyahu’s rise to power derived largely from his father, a mediocre academic and devout follower of Jabotinsky (who hoped Israel would be an ‘iron wall of Jewish bayonets’), an education in the United States, and the death of his older brother, Yoni, in the Entebbe raid, in 1976. The Netanyahu family has been particularly adept at inserting itself into political history. Yet the father was never an influential figure in the revisionist movement, Yoni was not a military hero in Entebbe, and Bibi was not an especially talented army officer.

Netanyahu likes to imagine himself as the saviour of the Jewish people. The reality is that his policies have jeopardised the security of Israel’s citizenry, corrupted civil society as only prosecuting an occupation can do, and made Israel an international pariah.

Netanyahu lacks the political will to make peace with the Palestinians. He plays the international community with cynical abandon, and relies on a coalition of religious extremists and right-wing bullies for electoral success. He is the master of spin both at home and abroad, he seduces a devoted American Jewish lobby, he has ‘reached out’ to Christian fanatics (fellow readers of Ayn Rand), and he has cosied up to right-wing leaders from Putin to Trump and Orbán. Last time he addressed the US congress, he received twenty-six standing ovations – to quote Jon Stewart, ‘by far the longest blowjob a Jewish man has ever received’.

Benjamin Netanyahu with US President Trump at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem on May 23 2017 (photo by US Embassy Tel Aviv)

At home, Netanyahu performs as the strong leader who will brook no deal with the Palestinians, while abroad he continues to feign interest in a resolution. He has toyed with a succession of worn-out American emissaries, while encouraging settlements and offering Palestinians the token of highly delimited self-rule. According to Pfeffer, he has never relinquished the conviction that the Middle East conflict is the result of implacable Arab hatred of the West and of Israel as the West’s outpost in the Middle East. The recent Nation-State Law declared Israel the nation state of the Jewish people, that only Jews have the right to self-determination, downgraded the status of Arabic, and continued support for settlements.

From all the evidence, it is hard not to conclude that Netanyahu has zero interest in resolving the conflict. He describes the Palestinian issue as a ‘rabbit hole’, while adopting the diversionary tactic of ramping up the threat Iran poses to the region and international order. Netanyahu’s enemies are the usual suspects: objective journalists, academics, policy analysts, Haaretz, and, of course, The New York Times. Like Donald Trump’s politics, his own are populist; his rhetoric appeals to the polity’s basest instincts. He fosters outsider versus insider resentment, dismisses criticism, and thinks in sound bites. Trump’s support for Israel, his relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem to insist on the city as Israel’s capital, were gifts from one marketing whiz to another.

All four of Israel’s most recent prime ministers have been investigated for corruption and bribery; Netanyahu and his wife are currently under investigation. Netanyahu has been caught with the proverbial in the trough. His wife finds largesse irresistible, bullies staff, and seems to have a touch of the Imelda Marcos. As a quid pro quo for Netanyahu’s indiscretions, his wife now vets all his appointments and has full access to his schedule.

Pfeffer argues that Netanyahu embodies Israel, a ‘hybrid society of ancient phobias and high-tech hope, a combination of tribalism and globalism’. The former prime minister, Ehud Barak, told Netanyahu ‘your behaviour is living proof that it is easier to take the Jews out of the galut [diaspora] than it is to take the galut out of the Jews’. Netanyahu’s strategy is to tolerate diplomatic entreaties while continuing to ensure that Israel does not have defined borders. Put simplistically, the problem is that Israelis want a homeland for Jewish people and Palestinians want a state of their own.

Pfeffer’s biographical challenge is to situate Netanyahu in the context of Israel’s political history, to accept the constraints of anonymous sources, and the subject’s refusal to be interviewed. He reportedly said, ‘Pfeffer doesn’t know anything about me, it will be a cartoon.’ Unfortunately, the story of Benjamin Netanyahu is anything but comedic.

My only quibble with this superb study is Pfeffer’s suggestion that Netanyahu is an intellectual. Tragically for the citizenry of Israel and Palestine, I can see no evidence of intellectual rigour and all that entails – evidence-based analysis, transparency, moral decency, and integrity. Instead, I read this brilliant biography as revealing a talent for spin, reading the Zeitgeist, blazing self-belief, raging ambition, and opportunism. How the impasse will be resolved remains unclear – in the era of the populist demagogue, I fear Bibi is not finished yet.

‘We think back through our mothers,’ writes Virginia Woolf (twice) in A Room of One’s Own. At first, she seems to be suggesting that women artists can only derive inspiration from women who precede them: ‘It is useless to go to the great men writers for help … the weight, the pace, the stride of a man’s mind are too unlike her own.’

But Woolf’s bravura rhetorical essay (she calls her writing ‘harliquinade’ for its ‘assortment of patches’) arrives at far more radical ideas about gender and the imagination than this essentialist position foreshadows. The artist’s mind, she argues later, is androgynous, with ‘no single state of being’, and can think back ‘through its mothers or through its fathers’.

‘To me,’ Shane Warne once said, ‘cricket is a simple game.’ Australia’s best-ever bowler may not be a renowned sporting philosopher, but his words echo throughout Gideon Haigh’s latest book. In recent years, governing body Cricket Australia and an army of corporate consultants have sought to complicate the country’s summer game. An alphabet soup of abbreviations – ACPPs, IPPs, PONIs, NPPs, and PPPs – have been developed to re-establish Australia’s position at the pinnacle of world cricket. Yet, as Haigh chronicles in a short book of revealing anecdotes and caustic one-liners, they have instead brought the game to its knees.

Crossing the Line: How Australian cricket lost its way begins and ends at 3 pm, 24 March 2018 in Cape Town. An away series against South Africa was slipping from Australia’s grasp at Newlands Stadium when an incident occurred that sent reverberations around the cricket-playing globe. With Proteas batsman A.B. de Villiers midway through building an imposing advantage, umpires Nigel Llong and Richard Illingworth suddenly beckoned two Australian players. Match-tracking website ESPNcricinfo observed at the time: ‘They are having a chat with Cameron Bancroft, and there could be something afoot here.’

‘Chopin is the greatest of them all,’ Claude Debussy told his pupil Marguerite Long, ‘for through the piano alone he discovered everything.’ This ‘everything’ had a long shadow, for Long described Debussy as ‘impregnated, almost inhabited, by [Chopin’s] pianism’. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the young Debussy composed a Mazurka and some Nocturnes, and then later, between 1909 and 1913, twenty-four Preludes, scribbling an epigraph under each to acknowledge inspiration or program, a nod to the epigraphs that clung with grim persistence to Chopin’s Preludes in the late nineteenth century. At the Exposition Universelle in 1889, Debussy encountered the scales and modes and gongs and bells of Javanese gamelan, and his music thereafter occupied a new landscape. Yet even then, as pianist and scholar Roy Howat has written, with his own voice secure and the sound world he evoked so foreign to French audiences, Debussy still managed to tip his cap in Chopin’s direction.

As I sat down to write this review, a media release popped into my email inbox with the excited news that more than 400,000 people had visited the National Gallery of Victoria’s MoMA exhibition over its four-month duration, making it the NGV’s ‘second most attended ticketed exhibition on record’. This large attendance figure was presumably cited as proof of the exhibition’s success. More numbers followed, in quotes attributable to the Victorian Minister for Creative Industries, Martin Foley, emphasising the importance of the arts to the state’s economy.

I have only been to Harden-Murrumburrah once, the small town where journalist Gabrielle Chan moved in 1996, leaving the Canberra press gallery to live on a farm with her husband. It was on the way back from a football match in Cootamundra, in the middle of another grim Canberra winter. After a tough win, we all jumped on the team bus and pub-crawled our way through various country towns, arriving in Harden during its Saturday-night peak hour. The evening was magnificent. Although initially suspicious, the locals seemed to enjoy it too. While my memory is hazy, the highlight was watching a local drinker perform the town’s unofficial ballad (I think it was about a dingo). By the third chorus, the entire pub was singing along.

Marise Payne’s recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly touted Australia’s support for ‘rules’ and ‘international law’ in creating a global order that works ‘for the benefit of all nations and people’. But are these really the guiding principles of Australian foreign policy? Clinton Fernandes’s new book gives us reasons to be sceptical.

The danger is complacency. Brendan Taylor cautions readers of this timely assessment of the swirling currents of power in Asia – and currents is the right metaphor, given the heavy focus on disputes at sea – not to simply have faith that everything will turn out okay. ‘The risk of major war in Asia is much greater today than most individuals assume,’  Taylor writes. Even among regional leaders and key players, he sees a ‘strange complacency about the prospects for conflict in Asia’, despite knowing just how devastating such a conflict would be.

Like so many parents of great authors, the fathers of Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce have much to answer for. Certainly, each man had a profound influence on his son’s literary career without for a moment being conscious of the literary consequences of his words and actions.

Forget the author – it’s the book that matters. That’s sound advice, but there are times when it is hard to follow. James Wood’s Upstate is a testing case. A quietly reflective little novel, elegantly written, with four main characters and a minimal plot, Upstate doesn’t look like a literary time bomb. Yet because its author is a renowned literary critic, it is bound to set off disputes about the idea of fiction that his book represents. As one of Wood’s many admirers, I would rejoice if he had written a masterpiece. Others might feel a degree of Schadenfreude in judging that he hasn’t. Wood is not free to write a novel that is merely good; he is called to perform to his own standard of excellence.

The story of the Sydney Opera House is usually told as the heroic tragedy of its Danish architect, Jørn Utzon, who won the design competition for his breathtaking cluster of white sails but resigned before its completion over conflict about practicalities, costs, and government interference. In her exquisite novel Shell, Kristina Olsson comes at the drama obliquely, from the perspective of Sydney’s working people.

In August 1964, Charmian Clift returned to Australia from the Greek island of Hydra after nearly fourteen years abroad. As Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell portray her return – a description based, as always in this book, on solid or at least reasonably persuasive evidence – she ‘was leaving her beloved Hydra forever, with the pain of her departure sharpened by the sting of humiliation and exile’. By the time the return voyage had begun, she later recalled, ‘the audacious bite of decision has long since been blunted … The freshness of the adventure has worn off and uncertainty, alas, is practically all that remains.’

As a boy, I watched with fascination an early sci-fi horror film, The Blob. After a meteorite lands in Pennsylvania, a small, gelatinous blob emerges from the crater. Starting with an inquisitive old man who probes this runaway black pudding with his walking stick, the blob proceeds to consume, literally, everything in its path, growing in girth and bringing greater terrors with each new small-town American engorgement.

Half a century ago, the Palestinian writer Edward Said described the state of exile as ‘the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home’. Its essential sadness, he believed, was not surmountable. The crippling sorrows of exile and estrangement, and the disfiguring legacies of intergenerational trauma, pervade Katherine Johnson’s powerful new novel. At its heart, it is also a poignant exploration of our stumbling efforts to seek solace in the world and the ways in which we attempt to overcome dislocation.

Many recent American politicians have believed that they could speak Spanish. Presidential candidate George W. Bush stumbled through a Spanish-language interview and was rewarded with thirty-five per cent of the Latino vote in the 2000 election. His brother Jeb, whose wife is Mexican-born, is a fluent speaker, but when he appealed to Spanish-speakers during the 2016 Republican Party primary, he received a typically brutal slap-down from Donald Trump. ‘This is a country,’ Trump chided his rival ‘where we speak English, not Spanish.’

Sarah Day’s début Towards Light & Other Poems by Sarah Daycollection, A Hunger to Be Less Serious (1987), married lightness of touch with depth of insight. In Towards Light & Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 108 pp, 9781925780024), Day continues this project in poems concerned with light, a thing presented as both transformative and transformable. In ‘Reservoir’, for instance, the glass of a porthole can bend light with ‘its oblique know-how’.

For admirers of Clive James’s poetry written since he became terminally ill in 2011 (and this reviewer is certainly one), The River in the Sky will pose something of a quandary. In collections like Sentenced to Life (2015) and Injury Time (2017), the poems were generally tough, vulnerable, well-turned and, given the circumstances, stoic. The River in the Sky has some of these qualities but is very different in nature and in its cumulative impact. Comprising scores of unnumbered verse paragraphs in various line lengths (iambic dimeter through to iambic pentameter), The River in the Sky is a kind of phantasmagoria presenting many key moments and visual episodes in James’s long, peripatetic life.

It is a cliché to note that Gordon Brown is an enigma as far as contemporary British politics is concerned. A fundamentally decent man of high moral standing, Brown forged with Tony Blair arguably the most successful political partnership the United Kingdom has known. Between them they won three elections (two of them landslides) on a platform of ‘modernising’ Britain, deploying a mantra of fiscal prudence combined with social justice aimed at improving the position of the least well off. More generally, Brown and Blair presented an intelligent, humane, and competent common front that makes the efforts of many of today’s politicians seem, by degrees, naïve, irritating, or supercilious. Blair’s reputation took a dive with the reckless decision to back George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein, but Brown had little to do with that decision. On the contrary, many of the positives of Labour’s new tenure in office can be directly attributed to Brown’s determination to improve welfare conditions. Yet his stocks seem just as low as Blair’s. Why?

‘I didn’t realise I was becoming untranslatable,’ Marcelo Cohen confessed after the publication of his eleventh novel, in an interview with Argentine newspaper Clarín. ‘And when I did realise, it was already too late.’ Given that Cohen is himself a renowned translator – the list of authors he has translated into Spanish reads like an index of literary influences: J.G. Ballard, T.S. Eliot, William S. Burroughs, Clarice Lispector – the fact that his writing is considered ‘untranslatable’ seems, in the words of his interviewer, like something of a ‘Karmic paradox’. And the badge of untranslatability casts a powerful spell: Cohen boasts a decades-long career and more than a dozen critically acclaimed works of fiction, yet Melodrome is the first of his novels to be published in English.

Just one thing can shape your whole life’ is one line in a novel of four hundred and fifty pages, but it is telling in its application toward the characters of this brilliant début novel. Set on the Hawkesbury River in 1806, the cast of characters is large and yet we find each of them living with the consequences of an earlier choice or misdemeanour that ripples beyond the singular life and into the nascent river community.

Gideon HaighWhy do you write?

Because you have to do something, and I’m no great shakes at anything else.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

No. A poor sleeper.

Where are you happiest?