Michelle de Kretser

Man out of Time by Stephanie BishopStephanie Bishop’s remarkable novel Man Out of Time (Hachette, reviewed in ABR 9/18) explores a man’s breakdown and its effects on his family. It’s shimmering and sorrowful, and the writing is extraordinary. Too Much Lip (UQP, 10/18) by Melissa Lucashenko is a strong, unflinching novel about homecoming and history. With trademark wit and lucidity, Lucashenko connects the lives of her sharply drawn characters to a dysfunctional national story. Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge (Scribe, 5/18), set among working-class lives, considers the collapse of the Westgate Bridge alongside a contemporary tragedy. It’s a moving, unsentimental novel about ethical complexities. Ghachar Ghochar (Faber, 2015) is a disturbing novella by Vivek Shanbhag (translated by Srinath Perur) about an Indian family that becomes wealthy – a gem.

Fiona Wright

Axiomatic by Maria TumarkinI was most excited by two ambitious and wild books of non-fiction, Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic (Brow Books, 9/18) and Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering: Intoxication and its aftermath (Granta, 8/18). Tumarkin’s book is breathtaking in its audacity, its deep empathy, and its intellectual rigour. It’s unlike anything I have ever read. The Recovering is a deeply affecting and complex blend of biography and autobiography, drawing intimate and affirming portraits of what it might mean to come back from addiction and illness. My favourite work of fiction was Ceridwen Dovey’s taut and thrilling In the Garden of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton, 3/18), which is about trauma and legacy and how we understand the past. It is full of images of tragic beauty.

A seven-hundred-page Collected Poems? The cover photograph of the Big Bloke himself is an embodiment of what’s inside in all its sprawling abundance. As is his surname, which can’t help but invoke our country’s big river, whether in full flood, or slow trickle, or slow spreading billabongs.

The first Les Murray poem I read was more a chain of ponds: the long sequence Walking to the Cattle Place: A meditation, published in an issue of Poetry Australia in 1972. I’d received a complimentary copy because the magazine contained one of my first poems. When I finally tired of admiring mine, I somehow found the time to glance through the others. I was floored by Murray’s cow poems, as surely as if their small herd had trampled right over me. I forgot my own juvenile scribble. It was obvious that this was the work of an off-the-scale poetic imagination:

At the hour I slept
kitchen lamps were sending out barefoot children
muzzy with stars and milk thistles
stoning up cows.
They will never forget their quick-fade cow-piss slippers
Nor chasing such warmth over white frost, saffron to steam,
It will make them sad bankers.
It may subtly ruin them for clerks

The sequence begins in Sanskrit, and winds its way through various cattle cultures and languages from Xhosa to a stockman’s Aboriginal English, as the poet meditates his way through a single day. It was luscious stuff, not least because luscious is a favorite Murray adjective, whether applied to cattle-dung, or plants, or meat: ‘luscious bone-fruit’ in the darkly shocking ‘The Artery’. Although Murray is a celebrator of life to his own bony core, he is never one to avert his eyes from its horrors. Along with its companion cattle-slaughtering piece, ‘Death Words’, ‘The Artery’ prefigures the much later ‘The Cows on Killing Day’, a tour de force written from the collective point of view of a first-person-plural herd-consciousness. There is no other poem like it.

Les Murray (photograph via Black Inc.)

Murray was once derided as a mere writer of cow poems, but even if that were all he wrote, he would stand as one of the most original poets in the English language. Or any language. I have a Hindi selection of his work, Setu... (The Bridges...), structured (not surprisingly) around his cow poems, which proves the point in one very slim volume.

Of course, he was always more than that. Sometimes, to telling effect, he was even less. The next poem of Murray’s that gored me was ‘The Mitchells’, a half-mumbled, less-is-more piece so laconic it is almost an anti-poem, or perhaps a final Zen-like distillation of earlier celebrations of the laconic style (which I read later) such as ‘Noonday Axeman’. This stuff springs more from the dried creek bed than the Murray in full flood. He wrote an entire book of small pieces – poems the size of photographs – in 2002. ‘The Aboriginal Cricketer: Mid-19th Century’ is a brilliant exemplar, although the more recent ‘Dog Skills’, a poem from the wordless world of whistling up cattle dogs, perhaps sums it up best: ‘Where whistling reshaped fingers // and words were one syll.’

There are also slow-spreading lagoon poems – ‘The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever’, ‘The Quality of Sprawl’ – and poems such as ‘The Broad Bean Sermon’, ‘Letters to the Winner’, and ‘The Shower’, which are more like a torrent of ideas and images.

Reading through this giant compendium makes you wonder if Murray could have published his various styles under various pseudonyms, like the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, and ended up with different schools of critics squabbling with one another. The combative polemicist would attract plenty of critics in our easily outraged era, but you’d need a tin ear not to like the epigrammatist (‘No land rights for bankers’; ‘I adore the Creator because I made myself’) and maybe a tin eye to ward off his visual twin the imagist’s ‘galahs in their pink confederacy’, sheep in a parched field ‘like legal wigs’, a cemetery as ‘the absorbed marble chess of the dead’, and ‘it is the time of day / when shadows come in like animals / and shelter under their trees’. Then there is the performance poet, when Murray, who likes to claim he is tone-deaf, ramps up the music in poems like the percussive ‘Morse’, the railway-rhythmic ‘The Smell of Coal Smoke’, the sheer verbal brilliance of ‘The Mouthless Image of God in the Hunter-Colo Mountains’, or the entire Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, with its origins in Indigenous traditions.

Most left-field is Les Murray the Strange Poet. When editing his New Oxford Book of Australian Verse (1986), he wrote of avoiding predictable selections, of seeking out his chosen poets’ ‘Strange Poem’: the poem in which they produce something better than, or beyond, their normal creative selves. There are countless very strange poems in this book, the much-anthologised ‘Bats’ Ultrasound’ still being as weird as any. Perhaps it was written to prove or to disprove the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s essay ‘What Is It Like to Be a Bat?’

ah, eyrie-ire, aero hour, eh?
O’er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array,
err, yaw, row wry aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.

A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.

This atonal music, half fingernails on blackboard, half bat-sonar pitched beyond the ear’s range, was first published in the important 1987 collection The Daylight Moon, but already looked clairvoyantly ahead to where it would come to roost (and where it has migrated to in the omnibus under review): Translations from the Natural World (2003). Not many books as strange as this one have been published anywhere; it remains the most cutting-edge and most naturally avant-garde book published in this country. Numerous poems are sheer genius: ‘Mollusc’, ‘Prehistory of Air’, ‘Two Dogs’, ‘The Cows on Killing Day’ (of course), and its fellow crowdfunded consciousness poems, ‘Pigs’ and ‘Shoal’.

Thomas Nagel argued that ‘we are completely unequipped to think about the subjective character of experience’ – of a bat, say – ‘without relying on the imagination – without taking up the point of view of the experiential subject’. He argues, ‘This should be regarded as a challenge to form new concepts and devise a new method – an objective phenomenology not dependent on empathy or the imagination.’ Murray does his best to magic other subjectives into our subjective at least – and to shake off the anthropomorphism that plagues animal poems. Translations is a masterwork of mind-reading and ventriloquism – and a celebration of the dazzle of language. It’s hard to lift a line from these miniatures without diminishing them, but here’s a quatrain from an earlier, more straightforward animal poem, ‘Wagtail’, to show what tail-twitchy fun the poet is capable of:

Busy daylong
eating small species,
making small faeces,
and a great wealth of song.

Subhuman Redneck Poems by Les Murray, 1996There are numerous Strange Poems in his most controversial volume, Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). Many are fuelled by depression (‘compere of the pre-dawn show’), none more so than the hard-to-read ‘Corniche’, a poem in which the fear of dying becomes a longing for it as the only cure, or solution. And yet, as the poet wrestles with the darkest of thoughts:

A self inside self, cool as conscience, one to be erased
in your final night, or faxed, still knows beneath
all the mute grand opera and uncaused effect –
that death which can be imagined is not true death.

‘Corniche’, like the other pre-dawn compèred poems in this book, is not easy to move past. But the sun rises again in the playful sarcasm of ‘The Rollover’: ‘Some of us primary producers, us farmers and authors / are going round to watch them evict a banker.’ There are also moving family portraits of the poet’s autistic son (‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’) and of his dying father, Cecil (‘The Last Hellos’): ‘Don’t die, Dad – / but they die.’

The People's Underworld by Les Murray, 1983Cecil’s elegy made me turn back a hundred-odd pages to The People’s Otherworld (1983) and reread the three celebrated poems Murray wrote in memory of his mother, who died when he was a boy. Otherworld is a ‘hinge’ volume in Murray’s work, besides ‘The Steel’ (the last line of which gives that volume its title) and various other poems I have already mentioned above, it contains ‘Equanimity’, with its satisfyingly steady-state vision:

… it lights us from the incommensurable
we sometimes glimpse, from being trapped in the point
(bird minds and ours being so pointedly visual):
a field all foreground, and equally all background,
like a painting of equality. Of infinite detailed extent
like God’s attention. Where nothing is diminished
by perspective.

‘Equanimity’ offers us ‘a first approximation’ of heaven, to quote from the last poem in the same volume. ‘Satis Passio’ is a kind of Ars Poetica, offering several other overlapping definitions: ‘Art is what can’t be summarised’, ‘Art’s best is a standing miracle / at an uncrossable slight distance’, and ‘there is this quality to art / which starts, rather than ends, at the gist. / Not the angle, but the angel.’  

Murray seems to me like some maverick, hyper-verbal angel, plonked down among us to mess with our heads, move our hearts, make us dabble our toes in luscious dung, and shower us with language in Shakespearean abundance. Given the autism in his family, his own gifts have a semi-autistic flavour. His brain is a very strange connecting machine, capable of the loosest of loose associations in a richly metaphoric way. He does and says what he likes, unconstrained by the tastes of the last fifteen minutes. He takes enormous risks and, if occasionally he doesn’t succeed, he is never afraid to have a go. He has, in short, absolute nerve. Which includes dedicating most of his books, including this one, to The Glory of God.

Snobs mind us off religion
nowdays, if they can.
Fuck them. I wish you God.

Snobs, agnostics, or believers, we are surely all on the same page when it comes to celebrating the beauties and wonders – and continuing profound mysteries – of existence and consciousness.

Back to ‘Walking to the Cattle Place’ and the closing lines of ‘Death Words’: ‘Perhaps God is inevitable. / He will not necessarily come, though, again, in our species.’

There was nothing inevitable about the strange angel Les Murray. He is a one-off fluke, so singular it’s hard to see a poet like him coming again in our species. As a bat? Maybe.

There was excitement. David Marr, newly appointed editor of the National Times at just thirty-three, had agreed to speak with politics students on campus. Volunteers were dispatched to buy the obligatory felafel and cheese, plastic cups, and cask wine, and at 3 pm the famous journalist arrived to address a small but enthusiastic group of undergraduates.

I heard the Egypt story countless times, but then Dorothy Porter believed that if a story was worth telling, it warranted multiple retellings. In the late 1980s, before Dot and I met, she visited Egypt to gather material for her verse novel Akhenaten (1992). In Cairo, she joined a tour group taking in the major historical sights. Dot was, by this time, steeped in the life and times of the visionary pharaoh Akhenaten: no matter what was in front of her, her thoughts remained fixed on Akhenaten and his queen, Nefertiti. It was perhaps inevitable that she would suggest the tour group take a detour – a very long detour as it turned out – to see Akhet-Aten, the city built by Akhenaten and greatly loved by him. She promised her fellow travellers an unparalleled treat.

Dot knew that Akhet-Aten had been abandoned at the end of Akhenaten’s reign; she also knew that, while it had long been an important archaeological site, there were no extant buildings. But in her mind, Akhenaten’s city existed – fully formed and filled with life.

The bus travelled for hours through the desert. Dot noticed the legs of a dead donkey ‘sticking out / stiff / in an otherwise / serenely barren desert’, but little else distracted the eye. Finally they reached their destination. Dot, immersed in her own excited imaginings, truly had arrived at Akhet-Aten, but not so the rest of the group. Far from the glittering city Dot had promised, they were confronted with more of Egypt’s abundant desert and another of its many archaeological sites. The heat was sizzling, the wind was wild, sand stuck to their skin, grit caught in their clothes. Dot’s fellow travellers were not happy.

Dorothy Porter in the Botanical Gardens (photograph by Robert Colvin)

Before a riot broke out, Dot stepped forward and gave one of her greatest performances, creating for the group – and for herself – Akhenaten’s beloved city. Out of the archaeological site, she fashioned buildings, gardens, water features, and temples. She created Akhenaten himself, that strangely beguiling figure with the long pointy chin and the thick cushiony mouth. She produced a long-dead Pharaoh and his city from a wildfire imagination fanned by memory and desire. Her fellow travellers returned to the bus satisfied.

Ever since childhood, Dorothy had plunged into her imagination to entertain others. At the age of fourteen, she captivated her schoolmates with a novel in instalments, shaped around a visit to the school by The Beatles. Best of all, she entertained herself with these stories, experiencing the risky and tantalising adventures that eluded her in real life. The imagination’s workings were always mysterious to her, but not the rewards.

Dorothy was an adolescent when first she experienced the ‘supernatural potency of poetry’. She felt as if poetry had found her, chosen her; she could not explain why or how, but she was profoundly grateful. This gift – and she always regarded it as a gift – remained subject to the vulnerability that invariably accompanies unexplained events and experiences. As she reminded herself: The gods give and the gods take away.

Her lifelong poet companions included Shakespeare, Auden, Dickinson, Sappho, Lorca, Akhmatova, Cavafy, and Coleridge. She identified in particular with Rilke, a poet terrified that his imagination would cool down and poetry would desert him, plunging him into the darkest abyss. When Rilke’s lover Lou Andreas-Salomé suggested that he might benefit from psychoanalysis, he refused: he was afraid that if his demons were taken from him, so, too, might be his angels. Dot shared Rilke’s fears and anxieties. She was more likely to consult a fortune-teller than a psychologist. One of her fortune-teller experiences, a complete rip-off in New York City, found its way into her verse novel What a Piece of Work (1999).

Dot was a pagan – with strong Jewish underpinnings (her paternal grandmother was Jewish). Nature was sacred and life-giving. There were libations under our apricot tree for the rewards that came to us, and special prayers offered for friends or family in trouble. Dot valued all living things equally: cats and rhinos, squids and sea hares, snakes and frogs. And birds. She was a dedicated bird watcher, albeit in her own idiosyncratic way: waiting silently and patiently was certainly not Dot’s way. She delighted in the happenstance of birds and drew rich inspiration from them.

Cover art from Dorothy Porter's Little Hoodlum (1975)

When she was undergoing chemotherapy, every morning a wattle bird appeared beyond the bedroom window, prancing along the balcony rail, noisily showing off. She wrote ‘The Wattle Bird’, a poem sparking with humour and anxiety:

I’m old enough
to be flattered
and take no courting attention
for granted

And when the wattle bird failed to appear:

I sip my strong coffee
and listlessly watch
the window
longing for the joyous noise
of my new, if just
rattling through,
boyfriend.

Her own personal totem was a bird: the raucous, brash, weirdly glamorous sulphur-crested cockatoo. The ancient Egyptians believed that the souls of the dead come back as birds. I welcome every sighting of a sulphur-crested cockatoo.

Dorothy revelled in the white heat of her poetic imagination and was never bored in her own company. Her imagination was always on high alert, so much so that often she did not see what was in front of her. This was extremely convenient when it came to housework, and enormously productive when it concerned poetry. One day, when she was writing The Monkey’s Mask (1994), we went to Melbourne’s Luna Park. Up ahead of us, on the main path, was a big-bottomed woman in bright-pink tracksuit pants. Several months later, Dot wrote ‘Style’.

In love I’ve got no style
my heart is decked out
in bright pink tracksuit pants.

Sometimes, such as in ‘Style’, I could locate the ‘memorymushed images’, but mostly I could not – and Dorothy adamantly did not want to. Like Rilke, she refused to question, she didn’t want to analyse. Don’t tempt the evil eye, as she would say. Just be grateful for what you’ve been given.

People are surprised to learn that it has been ten years since Dorothy Porter died. It doesn’t feel that long, they say. And why should it? Her poems are still being read, her songs are still being played. But there’s something else with the death of this small woman who carved out such a large space, something more.

The most powerful presence
is absence.

When the pyramid dissolves
you will keep
its shadow. its deep rich space.
in you.

I look through the glass windows at the back of our house, and I see her, standing on the path by the apricot tree, the strong squat figure, the fine brown hair, those expressive hands wrapped around a glass of white wine, and she’s talking and laughing and talking some more. And then she’s off and away, shooting to the skies like a comet, and, still talking, she zooms into the cosmos and out of sight. Bliss.

Faith

I’ve lived a life
illuminated and
choked
by dreaming

sometimes everything
threads together
in a lightning-charred
tapestry
almost too exciting
to contemplate
let alone live with

other times
have left me
stranded and sobbing
in a muggy black night
of longing
and plain bloody nonsense

but best of all
dreaming
has left a dusting
of memory-mushed images

doesn’t matter
if they can rear at me
like the legs of the frozen
dead donkey
I saw sticking out
stiff
in an otherwise
serenely barren desert

they burn and smelt
this world, this life
into great messy
plundering sense.

Dorothy Porter

When Anne Summers first met Germaine Greer at a raucous house party in Balmain in the early 1970s, she threw up in front of her after too many glasses of Jim Beam. Almost fifty years later, she muses that perhaps that early encounter was one of the reasons why they ‘never really connected’. After reading Summers’ latest memoir, Unfettered and Alive, in tandem with Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s Germaine: The life of Germaine Greer, I can think of a few others.

It is a curious thing, and not a little moving, to see writers celebrated for their work in other genres turn in later life with renewed vigour to poetry. David Malouf, like Clive James, has avowed a desire for poetry now, as the main form of writing his expression wants to take. Certainly, its brevity has a part in this, for the best of poems can happen, if fortunate, in minutes, not months, as Malouf himself observes. Yet the cogency of poetry speaks also to an impulse to voice the essential in life and nothing but, and to do it in a way that calls on all the writer’s powers of sound and gesture and concision.

ABR has asked fourteen academics to respond to revelations that Education Minister Simon Birmingham had vetoed eleven Australian Research Council grants despite the Australian Research Council’s rigorous peer-review process. 'The humanities are the heart of our culture and of our knowledge,' writes Philip Mead in his response, 'and their relevance is a constant source of surprise and sustenance – giving us answers to questions we hardly knew to ask.’ One wonders if Professor Mead’s view is shared by the federal government. Not for the first time, it has targeted the humanities in a way that does not apply to science or technology. ABR shares the academic community’s dismay at this philistine assault on academic freedom.

Margaret Gardner

Professor Margaret Gardner (photograph via Monash University)At Senate Estimates on 25 October 2018, it was revealed that eleven ARC grants for 2017 were rejected by the then Education Minister, Simon Birmingham. It has been many years since a Minister decided to override the exhaustive peer-review process. The Minister, with no explanation, rejected more than $4 million of grants to the humanities. Until the Senate Estimates revelation, those researchers believed that, despite receiving positive reviewer reports, they had just failed to make the cut. Now we all know they had made the cut, against fierce competition from the best researchers in their fields in the nation. But the Minister didn’t approve the awards. Not only were his decisions kept secret, there was no accounting for the reasons – apart from the views he revealed on Twitter when this information became public.

This is a fundamental affront to the principles on which universities operate. Academic or intellectual freedom guarantees the pursuit of knowledge free of interference or repression by external and internal parties. We, as universities, guarantee this freedom within their areas of expertise to our staff through statute and regulation. To see this core principle so cavalierly undermined is profoundly worrying. The Minister is, in his role, allocating research funding, on advice, to support the research mission of universities. The discretion he exercises should not be a personal one, based on his limited opinions about research topics. 

When individuals seek to undermine the nature of our collective academic endeavour, we must protest. In Minister Birmingham’s secret and ill-conceived derogation of humanities research and researchers, we have reached such a point. We have values to be defend. We demand that these actions not be repeated. We must not let this matter be brushed aside.

Professor Margaret Gardner AO is President and Vice-Chancellor of Monash University and Chair of Universities Australia

Ian Donaldson

Professor Ian Donaldson (photograph via the University of Melbourne)Once in office, no federal Minister of Education – however diverse and distinguished their own educational record may have been – has the time, the up-to-date knowledge, or the multiple skills required to assess the many applications for government funding over which they exercise nominal oversight. Happily, the Minister is always helped in this task by the detailed assessments of experts, commissioned from within Australia and across the world, who are asked to judge whether grant proposals are, or are not, of outstanding significance and worthy of public support. There may be occasions when a Minister sees what an expert in the field has failed to see: that a research proposal is in some way mischievous, ill conceived, or damaging to the national interest. On such rare occasions, the Minister must clearly explain to the researchers themselves, to their expert assessors, and to the general public the reasons for vetoing an already recommended grant. To withhold such an explanation – more astonishingly, to suppress all public knowledge of their veto – is to act not as an animator and inspirer of national research, but as a faceless bureaucrat might act in the service of a totalitarian state. Australia can do much better than that.

Professor Ian Donaldson FAHA, FBA, FRSE, Emeritus Professor at ANU and Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne

Brian Schmidt

Professor Brian Schmidt (photograph via ANU)We learned recently that eleven humanities ARC grants that had been recommended for funding through the peer-review process were denied by the former Education Minister Simon Birmingham. These included an early career fellowship (DECRA) for one of our own staff members, Dr Robert Wellington. I have committed the University to provide support so that Robert is able to maintain his research program.

Universities’ power to speak truth comes through their integrity, which is underpinned by the principles of academic freedom and academic autonomy. Within Western democracies, governments support these principles by providing research grants, typically administered by independent agencies, that are judged by a peer-review process, free of political or other types of interference. The competitive grants programs play a vital role in Australia’s research landscape, so it is essential that trust and confidence in their integrity are restored.

I am proud that ANU stands as one of the world’s strongest centres of humanities research. The outcomes of research in these disciplines are integral to understanding and tackling many of the big issues facing society, and I affirm the commitment of ANU to humanities research as a core activity. ANU joins the broader university sector in condemning the undermining of our peer-reviewed grant system. We will continue to advocate for humanities research to receive appropriate funding, free from political interference.

Professor Brian P. Schmidt AC FAA, FRS, Vice-Chancellor, President and Chief Executive Officer of ANU, Nobel Laureate in Physics, 2011

André Brett

Dr André Brett (photograph via Melbourne University Publishing)The effects of Simon Birmingham’s intervention for early career researchers (ECRs) are especially chilling. One victim of this veto consequently moved his young family to the United Kingdom because he could not obtain a position in Australia. ECRs represent some of Australia’s most promising and insightful new talent, yet little is done to keep them in our universities, where casualisation and precariousness are the norm. ARC grants are often make-or-break because chronic failures at institutional, system, and government levels have made stable, full-time academic positions elusive, especially in the humanities. To add a secret veto is injurious; to exercise it on a cursory glance at titles adds insult to injury; to defend the veto with flippant tweets is to rub salt into the wound. It is hard to view Birmingham’s behaviour as that of somebody serious about research excellence – or somebody serious about treating others professionally and respectfully. And if Dan Tehan is so concerned with research in the ‘national interest’, perhaps some enterprising researchers should pitch a project to examine whether national interest tests are in fact in the national interest. It is obviously not in the national interest to lose talented minds.

Dr André Brett, Postdoctoral research fellow in History, University of Wollongong

Stephen Garton

Professor Stephen Garton (photograph via University of Sydney)One of the many troubling aspects of the Seantor Birmingham’s egregious and deeply politicised action, is less the assertion that expertise can be trumped by politics (after all, it has happened before), but that this appeal to the mythical ‘base’ barely stirred the political waters. That suggests something disconcerting about the broader public perception of universities. It is fascinating that what is supposedly happening in the humanities and social sciences looms so large in the popular imaginary of what a university is. On the other hand, that popular imaginary is dispiriting given that it is so far removed from reality. The accusation that all ‘we’ do is ‘identity politics’ is deeply ingrained in many quarters. People look at me in amazement when I tell them that the most popular undergraduate major at Sydney is Economics. What would happen, however, if ministerial interference came to impact research on climate change? Would this rouse a greater popular outcry? I suspect so, but that in itself suggests that we haven’t yet persuaded sufficient numbers of citizens of the value of the humanities, despite years of good and purposeful activity to this end. We have culture work still to do.

Professor Stephen Garton FAHA, FASSA, FRAHS, Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor, The University of Sydney

Catherine Kevin

Dr Catherine Kevin (photograph via Flinders University)Simon Birmingham has interfered in the granting of research funds on the grounds of a notional taxpayer who is apparently unaware of how specialised knowledge-building works and the context in which it takes place. The international context is crucial for universities in more ways than one. Part of the remit of research is to illuminate Australia’s relevance to the world, to ensure that our experiences, concerns, and expertise are integrated into global conversations, that the connections are made. More pragmatically, international research impact is a key measure in all three major university ranking systems, and these are closely linked to the global education market. International students are buyers in the global marketplace and for them rankings count. If researchers are forced to tailor their proposals to Birmingham’s parochial, short-term interests, their universities will be hampered in this market and in the global conversation.

It is ironic that federal governments have increased pressure on universities to rely on international student income. Given Birmingham’s dismissal of ARC applications on the basis of their titles, is it any surprise that someone is failing to join the dots in the government’s flawed approach?

Dr Catherine Kevin, Senior Lecturer in Australian History, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Flinders University

Tom Griffiths

Professor Tom Griffiths (photograph via ANU)Simon Birmingham interfered in an independent review process, failed to understand the gravity of his personal intervention, and mocked the research being proposed. As Minister, he is not the expert on individual research projects. He is there to support the independent ARC, not to undermine its procedures. Decisions about research quality are not matters for politicians. The current peer-review assessment process is rigorous, exhausting, and punishing enough, and the opportunity costs of applying are, I believe, already too high. The Australian summer, which is a scholar’s precious, seasonal window of creativity, is now sacrificed to grant-writing. The impact of such summers on university research culture and morale is dire. If the Minister now imposes a further political veto, then the whole process is insupportable.

Professor Tom Griffiths AO FAHA, Emeritus Professor, ANU

Lisa Featherstone

Associate Professor Lisa Featherstone (photograph via The University of Queensland)In 2017, Australia’s third-largest export earner was the higher education of international students, beaten only by iron ore and coal. Higher education is the largest service industry, well ahead of income brought in from tourism. Despite cuts to the sector, Australia’s higher education sector is strong, and many Australian universities score highly on prestigious international scales. These scales are developed largely on research quality and quantity (rather than teaching), yet they are a major factor in attracting both undergraduate and postgraduate students from across the globe.

Australian universities have flourishing research cultures. Research cultures require funding, and the Australian Research Council is central to this, especially in the humanities, where grants are both scarce and highly regarded. The recent ministerial interference is troubling on many grounds. If we want high-profile researchers who can perform on the international stage, we need to allow researchers to follow their passions, and to develop new knowledge across all of the humanities, to be shared with our students and the broader community. More pragmatically, lack of funding will lead inevitably to falling rankings of Australian universities on international scales. In the longer term, this will no doubt lead to lower numbers of fee-paying students.

The impact of the minister’s interference is profound, with repercussions that are already reverberating through the sector.

Associate Professor Lisa Featherstone, Director of Teaching and Learning, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland 

Philip Mead

Professor Philip Mead (photograph via University of Melbourne)What has Australia lost with Minister Birmingham’s intervention into national research funding? How is our research culture poorer? And our contribution to world knowledge diminished? We’ve lost the investigative thinking of six established scholars about important contemporary social upheavals like rioting, and its links across the United Kingdom, America, Australia, and the Middle East. One of Australia’s leading art historians and his ideas about orientalist scholarship and the Mediterranean have been rubbished. We’ve lost the excitingly innovative work of three young scholars, including an original contribution to the history of film in a project about the relation of soviet cinema to Hollywood filmmaking. The brilliantly forward-looking work of one scholar about musicology and birdsong, and another’s about the struggle of First Nations peoples with modernity have been turned down.

The humanities are the heart of our culture and of our knowledge, and their relevance is a constant source of surprise and sustenance – giving us answers to questions we hardly knew to ask. Australian taxpayers will be dismayed to see the value of our humanities research disrespected and its global impact reduced. They will also be distressed by the effects of this intervention on our winning researchers.

Professor Philip Mead FAHA, Professor Emeritus of Australian Literature, University of Western Australia, Honorary Professorial Fellow, University of Melbourne, ARC College of Experts

Margaret Harris

Professor Margaret Harris (photograph via University of Sydney)For at least twenty-five years I have heard speculation about the ARC and its alleged preferences and prejudices. Yet even the most vociferous doubters, when put to the test of service on a selection panel, have declared the ARC’s processes to be as fair as humanly possible. The Minister’s decision to reject the expert advice that generated eleven of the ARC’s recommendations demonstrates contempt both for the proposed projects and the rigorous process of assessment undertaken without payment by humanities and creative arts academics and practitioners. Assessors, whether national or international, have had their confidence in the integrity of the process in which they participate completely undermined by arrogant political censorship. Would the minister have applied what for all the world seems like a version of the pub test to grants from science or technology disciplines?

Margaret Harris FAHA, Challis Professor of English Literature Emerita, The University of Sydney

Mark Edele

Professor Mark Edele (photograph via University of Melbourne)I agree with the minister. Taxpayer dollars should be spent in the national interest. However, ‘national benefit’ is already part of the application process. So, either the change is semantic or what we are really talking about is a pub test. The outcome would depend on the drinking establishment in question. In my local in the inner north of Melbourne, for example, being a historian of the Soviet Union regularly passes muster. I would happily present my proposals there.

Why not instead shut down the ARC? Distribute the money back to the Universities to be used for Humanities research and teaching. Then, Australian academics would no longer have to spend a quarter of their year on impossibly complex applications and their peer review. The best scholars would no longer be shut away in an ivory tower to write more proposals, never to see a student again. Careers would again be dependent on excellence in scholarship and teaching rather than in grant success. Professors would share the teaching with lecturers. Junior academics, no longer groaning under impossible teaching loads and insecure employment, could also write smart books. Now that would truly be in the national interest.

Professor Mark Edele, Hansen Chair in History, The University of Melbourne; ARC Future Fellow; Member of the ARC College of Experts

Kate Fullagar

Dr Kate Fullagar (photograph via Twitter)In the ongoing furore around revelations of ministerial research grant vetoes, two things are in danger of slipping from view. One is that the vetoes always and only target the humanities. The other is that the government is now gaslighting the public about what went on. In the ludicrous debate about pub tests, no one holds up non-humanities titles for scrutiny. A random search for recently funded STEM grants turns up ‘Noncommutative geometry in representation theory and quantum physics’, ‘Structure-activity relationships in silicon-based photovoltaics through atomic scale microscopy’, and ‘Multi-person stochastic games with idiosyncratic information flows’. I do not know what any of these mean. But that is the point. I need experts to tell me what they are about, why they should be funded, and what they could do for knowledge, humanity, or the planet. If they got funded by the ARC, I trust that they are worthy because I know they were scrutinised by around ten people at the university level before even being submitted, and that they were then reviewed by two to six anonymous peers before passing an analysis by a College of internationally recognised scholars. The government needs to explain its methodology and objective in applying one test for some and a second for others.

Minister Tehan recently claimed to adjust the rules for future ARC grants in order to ‘improve the public’s confidence’ in the grant system. His predecessor, however, gave no evidence of feeling pressure from the public and vetoed titles that had not been seen by the public. After such a flagrant dismissal of expert advice, it is the ministry that needs to regain our confidence.

Dr Kate Fullagar, Senior Lecturer, Department of Modern History, Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University

Robert Phiddian

Professor Robert Phiddian (photograph via Flinders University)Yet again our sector is a victim of its low fiscal stakes and high symbolic value. It was the arts and Brandis in 2015; now it’s Birmingham and the humanities in 2018. The culture warriors make a virtue-signalling racket, knowing that the lives and careers of people in culture can be messed with casually and at no real financial or political cost. No real financial cost: $200,000 for a research project is a lot of money for an individual, but the arbitrarily condemned projects don’t amount even to a rounding error in the context of a federal budget. No real political costs: humanities and the arts have for decades been lost to the conservatives. But real institutional cost: playing to the peanut gallery to subvert settled scholarly and bureaucratic processes (never perfect, but better than decision by populist whim) is the current fad, with everything reduced to tactical political advantage.

Not many dead in this little skirmish, perhaps, but where to next when a future Minister Humpty Dumpty can declare that national interest ‘means just what I choose it to mean’? It’s a very bad decision – even worse as a precedent.

Robert Phiddian, Professor of English at Flinders University, foundation director of the Australasian Consortium of Humanities Research Centres (2011–17) 

Professor Marilyn Lake (photograph via the University of Melbourne)Marilyn Lake

Historians must attend to context. Even as the Coalition government intervened to veto ARC grants for young scholars in the humanities – eleven of the small minority of applications approved through an extensive independent review process – and insists on maintaining funding cuts to our major cultural institutions, including the Australian National Library and National Archives, it offers an astonishing $500 million dollars to the Australian War Memorial so that it might expand exhibitions of the nation’s military history. With its new insistence on research that serves Australia’s security, foreign policy, and strategic national interests (The Age, 11 November 2018), the Coalition government makes explicit its support for the militarisation of our history and culture at the expense of original scholarship of international significance. Border-force mentalities now police the nation’s intellectual work even as they preside over customs, immigration, and the turn-back of asylum seekers.

Marilyn Lake AO DLitt FAHA FASSA is Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Research for her next book, Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform, forthcoming with Harvard University Press, was supported by an ARC Discovery grant.

In October, the Australian research and academic community was angered by the revelation that the former Minister for Education and Training, Senator Simon Birmingham, vetoed eleven Australian Research Council (ARC) grants that had been recommended for funding following a rigorous peer-review process. The minister did not provide reasons for his secret intervention, which resulted in a cut of $4.1 million to grants in the humanities. Academics are rarely united as one, but social media was filled with statements from more than a dozen peak professional associations in the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and medical research sectors, and staunch public pronouncements by vice chancellors at La Trobe, Melbourne, Monash, UNSW, and ACU, all four Learned Academies, and Universities Australia – to name a few – who were unanimous in their condemnation.

Why did the research community respond in such a highly public and united way? Senator Birmingham’s decision to exercise his right to veto grants, and to do so by stealth and without providing robust academic reasons, severely undermines the independent and rigorous peer-review assessment of applications for funding.

Rarely does one come across a book that is both intensely ‘literary’ – stylised, sophisticated, deeply engaged with its antecedents – and achingly moving, so viscerally raw that it takes one’s breath away. A Passing Bell: Ghazals for Tina – an elegy-sequence for Tina Kane, to whom Paul Kane was married for thirty-six years – is such a work.

Kane’s use of the ghazal is an inspired choice. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965) notes that the ghazal is an Arabian form that brings together the amorous, the elegiac, and the mystical, all elements central to A Passing Bell. Kane does not use the monorhyme of the traditional ghazal (aa ba ca, and so on), but the repeating twelve-line structure that he employs gives form to the poems’ intense expressions of grief.

Tina Kane – who died of motor neurone disease in 2015 – was a conservator in textile conservation at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City. She was also a textile consultant, writer, translator, and critic. (ABR published a late poem of hers in December 2014.) The word ‘text’ comes from the Latin word meaning ‘tissue’ and ‘woven fabric’. Kane does not belabour the link between his work and that of his late wife’s, but it is movingly apparent: ‘You knew the way of working, Tina, how – in your hands – / the smallest thread could ravel up the world’. The image of shared work, and a shared life, runs throughout the collection, and its loss produces a melancholically repetitive process of ravelling and unravelling: ‘There are threads of you everywhere I go because they hang off me, barely visible. / Tug at one and I unravel. But then, every morning, I gather myself together’ (Ghazal 109).

'A country that fails its purge is about to fail its renovation,’ warned French-Algerian writer Albert Camus in a January 1945 editorial. Camus’ ominous edict, issued in the weeks following the end of Germany’s occupation of France, encapsulates something of what Agnès Poirier is trying to say in this, her second book in English. The Occupation and its aftermath form the start of an exuberant tour of the cultural and intellectual life of 1940s Paris, centred on the French capital’s Left Bank.

Many readers – though apparently not enough to have saved them – will mourn the recent demise of Black Inc.’s annual Best Australian anthologies of essays, stories, and poems (which first appeared in 1998, 1999, and 2003, respectively). The last of these, however, has won something of a reprieve in Best Summer Stories, edited by Aviva Tuffield. A publisher at Black Inc. when this new project began, Tuffield has since moved to UQP. It seems a good decision to have retained her as editor.

ABR welcomes succinct letters and website comments. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. If you're interested in writing to ABR, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification.

The damage is twofold

Dear Editor,

There is nothing good to be said about the news that eleven humanities grants, recommended via rigorous peer review, were vetoed in secret by former Education Minister Simon Birmingham. What makes it worse is that all eleven were humanities projects. Let us remember that humanities only gets around ten per cent of Australian Research Council grants anyway. Quite apart from the good work that won’t get done and the talent that will leave our shores (at least one scholar whose early career grant was vetoed has gone overseas), the damage is twofold: the knock to public faith in expert review caused when it is politicised; and real career damage for those targeted (at least one scholar’s promotion was slowed as a direct consequence).

So what can we do? We can condemn this veto with a strong and united voice, and we did: all thirty-nine Vice-Chancellors stood up with the rest of the sector. At the same time, we must explain clearly why research matters and why peer review is rigorous and fair. No one thinks it is acceptable for the Sports Minister to choose the Olympic team, for instance.

Most of all, we mustn’t lose heart.

Read the responses of thirteen academics to the ARC controversy.

Catriona Jackson, Chief Executive of Universities Australia

Talking value

Dear Editor,

Gabriella Coslovich credits Julian Meyrick, Robert Phiddian, and Tully Barnett with launching a ‘much-needed public debate’, opening a discussion ‘we sorely need to have’ (review of What Matters? Talking value in Australian culture, ABR, November 2018). Strangely, however, she shows little interest in the actual suggestions they have to make.

This seems to follow a common pattern. It is not difficult to find nodding assent to the idea that we need to learn again to value art and culture in qualitative terms – to reverse the tendency, as Coslovich puts it, to frame them ‘wholly through the lens of economic benefit’. But when anyone attempts the difficult work of proposing alternatives, they are too often met with perplexity and indifference.

Most such attempts are ‘quirky’, as Coslovich describes What Matters? They are working against the grain of dominant ways of thinking. They are experimental, exploratory, struggling to find ways to engage with existing institutions and processes while refusing the heavily metricised accounting frameworks that have come to govern them. They lack the assurance and sophistication that belong to well-established paradigms.

The shortcoming on which Coslovich chooses to skewer What Matters? is language – that perennial alibi for refusing to extend sympathy into difficult terrain. Good writing is a theme introduced by Meyrick, Phiddian, and Barnett themselves. While criticising an over-reliance on numbers in accounting around arts and culture, they draw on Don Watson’s Death Sentence to criticise also the bureaucratic language that attends it. Yet for Coslovich, their own book has examples of poor writing.

This is a piece of easy point-scoring that misses the specificity of Watson’s arguments. Watson does not merely tut-tut about ugly expressions or unfortunate turns of phrase. He identifies a very particular kind of ugliness associated with the takeover of public discourse by abstract managerialism. The writing in What Matters? is about as far from this as it is possible to get.

For those prepared to read more openly and receptively, What Matters? has more to offer than Coslovich’s review suggests. It does not merely ask the right questions: it has important suggestions to make about how we might recover values-based conversations about art and culture. ‘Quirky’ it may be, but this, currently, is where attempts at developing values-based approaches are. If we care about the larger objective, we must be prepared to put this aside and engage.

Mark Gibson, Caulfield East, Vic.

Gabriella Coslovich replies:

When a book’s main focus is on proposing a clearer and more vital way to talk and write about the value of the arts, one that goes beyond the reductive use of metrics, it is reasonable for a reviewer to consider the clarity of the book’s own communication, particularly when the authors make a big deal about intelligibility, as these authors do. They repeatedly refer to the sins of ‘bullshit language’; they state that ‘language matters’ and refer to language as ‘our most important tool for thinking and living together’. Yes, new ways of thinking are ‘experimental’ and ‘exploratory’, but they can be communicated with clarity. Unfortunately, What Matters? lapses at times into obscure language that frustrates genuine attempts to engage with the authors’ arguments. In spirit, the book rejects the ugliness of ‘abstract managerialism’; in words, not always.

Spot on

Dear Editor,

I’m not surprised that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu thought that Anshel Pfeffer would produce a ‘cartoon character’ in his biography of Bibi (ABR, November 2018). Anyone who calls Netanyahu an ‘intellectual’ clearly must be the favourite to win the Cartoon Character Biography Prize. Louise Adler got it spot on: although she didn’t say so directly, I can imagine her asking: How can anyone who consistently sells robbery and murder to a gullible electorate be an intellectual? Perhaps being an intellectual these days (in an increasingly extreme-right-wing environment) implies the capacity to think how to get others not to think?

Anyone who writes a largely accurate biography of Netanyahu is certainly courageous. And so is someone who tells the truth while reviewing that book.

Kim Farleigh (online comment)

$8,500 Peter Porter Poetry Prize closing soon!

Peter Porter (1929–2010)

Poets don’t have long to enter the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, worth a total of $8,500. All poets have until midnight 3 December to submit their entry. This year’s judges are Judith Bishop, John Hawke, and Paul Kane.

The Porter Prize is one of Australia’s most lucrative and respected awards for poetry. It honours the life and work of the great Australian poet Peter Porter (1929–2010), an honoured contributor to ABR for many years. All poets writing in English are eligible to enter.

Essayists have longer: the Calibre Essay Prize (worth $7,500) doesn’t close until 15 January 2018.

Meanwhile, we look forward to announcing details of the 2019 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize in the next issue.

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.

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

ARC debacle

ABR, like many of our colleagues and partners in the academic community, was appalled to learn of former Education Minister Simon Birmingham’s veto of eleven Australian Research Council grants, an intervention that only came to light on October 25 because of dogged work at the Senate Estimates hearings, initiated by Labor Senator Kim Carr. Once again, only the humanities were targeted.

This ministerial intervention (unusual but not unprecedented) upsets the rigorous peer-review process that underpins the ARC grant-making process. A group of respected and enquiring researchers have been publicly humiliated as not being worthy of some fatuous pub test. Now their colleagues in the higher education community are threatened with a ‘national interest’ test that seems likely to complicate and politicise this already exhaustive, time-consuming annual process.

We invited Professor Joy Damousi – President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities – to comment. Her article, which can be read here, is also followed by statements by thirteen senior colleagues around the country, found here.

David Goldblatt retrospective at MCA

Eyesight testing at the Vosloosrus Eye Clinic of the Boksburg Lions Club. 1980 silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper. Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

The Museum of Contemporary Art is currently exhibiting an extensive photographic retrospective of David Goldblatt, a seminal South African photographer. Goldblatt gained international recognition for his work documenting South Africa, both during apartheid and proceeding it, crafting an unflinching portrait of the nation’s people, its workforce, and landscapes. Alison Stieven-Taylor reviews the collection, David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948–2018, and describes it as ‘an exhibition you need to plan for’, one ‘not designed for a quick whip-around’.

Alison Lester wins $60,000 Melbourne Prize

Alison Lester (photograph via Affirm Press)

Alison Lester has become the first children’s author to win the Melbourne Prize for Literature. Last month she was named the winner of the 2018 Prize, which is worth $60,000. Lester has been riveting children for more than thirty years; she has published about twenty-five books.

Lester was chosen from a formidable shortlist comprising Tony Birch, Gideon Haigh, Christos Tsiolkas, and Alexis Wright. Maria Tumarkin was chosen as the winner of the Best Writing Award for her non-fiction work Axiomatic, published by Brow Books. This enterprising new independent publisher also saw another of its writers pick up the Readings Residency Award, with Jamie Marina Lau announced as winner for her first book, Pink Mountain on Locust Island.

Plentiful Poetry

The Australian poet Dorothy Porter (1956–2008)

Several contributors to our Books of the Year feature remark on the large number of estimable poetry collections published in 2018. Elsewhere, we review four of them, including David Malouf’s An Open Book (UQP) and Les Murray’s Collected Poems (Black Inc.), both of which are nominated by several critics.

Our special feature also carries a tribute to Dorothy Porter, fondly remembered by her countless readers and by this magazine (she wrote for us from 1992 to 2008). Dorothy died on 10 December 2008, aged only fifty-four. In the following issue, Advances remarked that she was a kind of diva of Australian poetry. Dot’s divadom is secure: she’s still read, and circulating, and missed.

We’re delighted to publish a brief memoir of Dorothy Porter by her long-time partner, Andrea Goldsmith.

Alexis Wright to speak on censorship and storytelling

Alexis Wright (photo by Giramondo Publishing)

Acclaimed author Alexis Wright will present the 2018 Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture at State Library Victoria. Wright is a previous winner of both the Stella Award (Tracker, 2018) and the Miles Franklin Award (Carpentaria, 2007). Her lecture, titled ‘Censorship and Telling the Untold Stories’, will examine society’s changing attitude to storytelling amid heightened sensitivity and censorship. ‘Are we already controlled to the point that we do not even recognise how we are being censored from speaking out, or telling the truth, because we know the consequences of creating waves?’ Ms Wright has written. ‘I wonder what would become of humankind if we no longer told the stories of who we are.”

The Stephen Murray-Smith Memorial Lecture will be held at 6 pm on Monday, December 3 in the Village Roadshow Theatrette at State Library Victoria. It is a free event but bookings are essential. To book, click here.

Office closure

We’re all taking a short break after this busy and transformative year. The office will close from December 24 to 28, reopening on Monday, December 31.

Thanks, meanwhile, to our subscribers, readers, partners, board members, editorial advisers, and volunteers. It’s been another remarkable year for private donations: we are most grateful to all our Patrons. Without your continuing support the magazine would, of necessity, be a smaller and less ambitious entity. Particular thanks to the 300 or so critics and writers who have published with us this year – 93 of them wholly new to the magazine.

Finally, my personal thanks to Amy Baillieu, Grace Chang, Christopher Menz, and Jack Callil – the tiny cohort that keeps this magazine humming. Ed.

Film tickets

This month, thanks to Palace Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War, winner of the Best Director prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.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.

As a young man, George Washington (1732–99) worked as a surveyor. Looking at a landscape, he could plan its division into orderly tracts. These skills would prove useful when he became the first president of the United States in April 1789. At the time, Americans widely believed that new territory was vital to securing ongoing independence, in large part because small parcels of land could be sold to European settlers, expanding the American polity and helping pay down crushing Revolutionary War debts. As a result, President Washington made the fledgling country’s territorial expansion his chief focus. It was a perfect fit between man and mission, between a surveyor and a country that would grow from a set of colonies perched on the east coast of North America to a continent-spanning empire. Of course, this growth was far from inevitable. What would become the United States was already inhabited by as many as a million American Indians, and expanding west beyond the Appalachian mountains would be far messier than reorganising a landscape along a surveyor’s grid.

This is a deeply rewarding and timely book. Hugh Stretton (1924–2015) was one of Australia’s finest public intellectuals, a historian, ABC Boyer Lecturer, and social democrat with a steely mind and a calm, clear voice of wisdom. Stretton spent thirty years arguing thoughtfully against neoliberalism, a critique he developed at the beginnings of the ideological lurch to the right in the 1980s. Politics and society are now finally catching up with him. As ideas of the public good are being revived, as governments begin to invest again in urban infrastructure, and as inequality re-emerges as a crucial social issue, Hugh Stretton’s lifetime of practical historical thinking on these matters becomes a vital resource.

In 2016 A.S. Patrić’s first novel, Black Rock, White City won the Miles Franklin Literary Award. Two years earlier (he told an interviewer) he couldn’t even get a rejection slip for it: not one of the big Australian publishers responded when he sent the manuscript. The independent company Transit Lounge took it on, and the rest is history. Or, rather, the rest of Patrić’s work comes into the light: Transit Lounge has since published his second novel, Atlantic Black (2017), and now this, his fourth collection of short fiction.

On 15 May 1797 a fishing boat passing Wattamolla, in what is now Sydney’s Royal National Park, spotted three men on the beach. Rescued and returned to Sydney, the trio – tea merchant and supercargo William Clarke, sailor John Bennet, and Clarke’s lascar manservant, Srinivas – told an extraordinary story. After their ship, the Sydney Cove, was wrecked on Preservation Island in Bass Strait, they, along with fourteen other men, had set off in a longboat, hoping to fetch help for the other survivors. But when the longboat was also wrecked off the Ninety Mile Beach along Victoria, the survivors chose to do the only thing left open to them: follow the coast north on foot until they found help.

Jock Serong’s fourth novel, Preservation, takes this largely forgotten footnote to colonial history and uses it as the basis for a compelling study of European rapacity and blindness. Opening with the return of the three survivors to Sydney, the novel reimagines not just the trek north, but also the events leading up to the wreck and the impact the survivors had on the colony in which eventually they find themselves.

In the swampy heat of a Brisbane summer in 1986, a young bookshop assistant tries to solve a fifty-year-old mystery involving Inga Karlson, a legendary New York author who died in a warehouse fire in 1939. Caddie Walker, the bookseller, is idealistic enough to believe that books can change people’s lives. Perhaps they can: literally, and in unexpected ways.

For as long as I have studied Classics, first as a high-school student, later as an undergraduate and PhD student, and now as a professor, I have carried Homer’s poems close to me. The Iliad and, to a slightly lesser extent, the Odyssey are my touchstones. All that needs to be known can be found in them. I have taught them for more years than I care to remember. I still cry at certain parts. I see them, feel them, hear them. But I have never published a single article, chapter, or anything resembling scholarly criticism on them. They defy me. To contemplate translating them is so alien to me that I instantly admire any Classicist who has been brave enough to take on such a herculean task.

But with admiration comes simultaneous caution and even a bit of resentment: What have they done to my Iliad and Odyssey? This suspicion has seen me returning time and again to the translators of my youth: Richmond Lattimore and E.V. Rieu. There is an intense sentimentality around my relationship with Lattimore’s translations; these were my undergraduate editions and I still have them, albeit battered and – in the case of the Odyssey – more loose-leafed than bound. Rieu’s translations are treasured for more romantic reasons, centring around stories of him translating passages from the Odyssey to his wife and daughters as the bombs of World War II rained down on London. I also admire Rieu for practical reasons: he rendered the great works into prose and produced – for the first time in English – readable, accurate, and affordable (via the newly formed Penguin Classics) translations that took both epics out of the élite halls of Greek undergraduate classes and gave them to the public. By the same token, I am in awe of Lattimore, who took on the burden of the long, six-beat dactylic hexameter of the original, which resists the rhythms of English, and produced what is traditionally regarded as the best poetic translation of both poems.

When one ponders the sublimity that is the Homeric canon, and admires its best translators, it is a mystery why Classicists still attempt to scale Mount Olympus and sit alongside the anonymous poetic collective known as ‘Homer’ and his rare priestly breed of superior interpreters. I use the word ‘priestly’ in the old-fashioned gendered sense because Homer has traditionally belonged to men. Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey has, therefore, broken with tradition and has, for several reasons, contributed significantly to Homeric scholarship. This is partly because she is a woman. But this is a somewhat predictable and tedious conversation to have around the publication in view of the other, more pressing issues in need of discussion when it comes to translating Homer.

In the footsteps of Shakespeare to Keats to those contemporary poets composing in English, Wilson’s translation is in iambic pentameter, which maintains the same length of the dactylic hexameter and the same lines. Maintenance of the original word order, which is different to English syntactic structure and provides an added layer of meaning by accentuating key moments, ideas, and emotions, is also admirably observed as much as possible. Likewise, the beauty of Homer’s plain or unadorned language, with its vividness and variety of mood reliant on imagery rather than ornate vocabulary, is referenced by Wilson in a pared-back, elegant style. The characteristic epithet of both the Iliad and the Odyssey – ‘Swift-footed Achilles’, ‘Shining-helmed Hector’, ‘Grey-eyed Athena’, ‘Quick-thinking Odysseus’ – usually rendered with the same adjective in Greek, and therefore often repeatedly rendered in a translation with the same word – are interpreted and therefore translated with a fuller or more varied vocabulary herein. Thus, we have polytropos and its equivalents (like polymentis), Odysseus’s trademark epithet(s), freely translated as ‘complicated’, ‘the man who can adapt to anything’, and ‘the lord of lies’, and other variations. Rather than the reliance on one choice of word, such as ‘wily’ (also used in this translation), Wilson listens to the demands of the context to select what she senses it needs. And she is invariably right. This translation, in its entirety, is right.

Photograph taken of the bust of Homer in the British Museum, London. Translating the Iliad is not the same as translating the Odyssey. This is not only because the two poems are separated by at least a generation, with the Iliad thought to have been composed first (sometime around the middle to late eighth century bce), but also because of the substantially different – and yet related – subject matter. While the Odyssey contains folktale elements, with its middle ‘books’ dedicated to the fantastical wanderings of Odysseus, and its decidedly domestic environments, the Iliad traces some fifty days in the last phase of the ten-year Trojan War. While it has elements of domesticity, with occasional scenes of the warriors – both Trojan and Greek – eating, reposing, and, in the case of the Trojans, visiting wives, mothers, and children, the Iliad is devoid of the fairy tales of the Odyssey and its moments of levity, chronicling instead a claustrophobic world of siege warfare, violence, heartbreak, and battle fatigue. Reading this is a life-changing experience, and its sublimity almost defies translation. ‘Touch the text at your peril’, seems to be the mantra of most Classicists, though, like Wilson, Peter Green has recently made the hero’s journey along the path of translation.

Also, like Wilson, Green had established himself as a formidable translator before tackling Homer. He too was not afraid of attempting an English rendition of the hexameter, choosing to base his inspiration on C. Day-Lewis’s approach to translating Virgil’s Georgics in 1940, which was commissioned for broadcasting and therefore had to ‘sound’ like poetry. Day-Lewis’s solution, which he developed in his magisterial translation of the Aeneid in 1952, was to vary the length of the line of the strict epic metre, moving between the six-beat dactylic hexameter and the five-beat catalectic hexameter. The slight relaxation of metrical accuracy enabled Day-Lewis, and now Green, to concentrate on meaning without sacrificing poetics to it.

Green is a more emphatic translator when it comes to interpreting the original as a more grandiose, rhetorical style of poetry. To be fair, the Iliad is more formal in its construction and, at times, its language, compared to the Odyssey. However, the translation is stiff at times, which is mostly the result of a more rigid approach to capturing the original word order of the Greek. At times, Homer’s translators need translating.

Both new editions are, overall, excellent, although Wilson’s is a translation of her selected text that is without peer. Green’s Iliad may sit (almost) beside Lattimore’s, but the peerless English translation of the Iliad is yet to come. Perhaps, understandably, it never will.

Just as we are unlikely today to think of South Wales when in New South Wales, the existence of the Sydney Opera House does not of itself draw our collective attention towards opera. It is a structure more to be seen than heard; its professed reason for being long ago overshadowed by those iconic sails, and by the internal compromises that mired its construction. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, for instance, presents physical and technical hindrances to opera production that the recent renovations can only partially redress.

Erecting a public space for opera on such a scale and cost, in such a prominent location, was always going to be a fraught endeavour in Australia. Opera has never been front and centre of the nation’s cultural consciousness, and yet here was a bold attempt to make it so by sheer force of architectural conceit and stunning location. The public turmoil that accompanied its construction was of such a scale that it eventually inspired an opera in its own right, The Eighth Wonder (1995), by Alan John and Dennis Watkins. It in turn serves as one of eighteen Australian operas for investigation in Michael Halliwell’s National Identity in Contemporary Australian Opera: Myths reconsidered. The underlying premise of the book ‘is that it is possible to read the postcolonial development of Australian national identity in the nation’s modern operas’. To this end, Halliwell discerns recurring themes across these works, such as their interest in ideas of ‘the quest’, ‘the outsider’, ‘gender’, ‘race’, failure’, and ‘the bush’, among others.

With the exception, perhaps, of ‘the bush’, at first glance there seems to be little that sets Australian opera apart in such themes; they are also frequently encountered across the mainstream operatic repertoire. Such ubiquity speaks both to the form’s international currency but also to its historic cultural ambition. What is perhaps more telling about the peculiarities of the Australian operatic landscape is the fact that The Eighth Wonder is only one of a very small number of contemporary Australian works to have received more than one production. This dismal statistic is true even of the work that Halliwell considers to be ‘central to an Australian operatic canon’, if such there be one: Richard Meale and David Malouf’s Voss (1986). I suspect there would be very few opera singers or performers, let alone audience members, who could hum a note of it today.

Halliwell’s survey of these eighteen works thus takes on something of the character of an archaeological dig. In returning each of these works to our attention, he provides detailed synopses and digests of their critical reception before exploring the broader themes they share in common. This alone makes his book a useful reference work. A more complete understanding of their reception, however, would require closer consideration of the institutional context in which each work arose. The shape and form of these works will have been determined as much by the contingencies of institutional cultures, the public, and private funding arrangements that lie behind them, as much as by a composer and librettist’s wish to tap into, and express, something of the national Zeitgeist. Furthermore, a rarely acknowledged accompaniment to all this creative work is the lack of strong advocacy from our national company, and also from our conservatoires and the mainstream arts media, for the very idea of a repertoire of Australian operas.

Arguments derived from close engagement with the music itself are also few and far between. The following assertion by the series editor, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, in her preface – ‘new brands of scholarship have allowed a more comprehensive and intensive interrogation of the complex nexus of means of artistic expression operative in opera, one that has meaningfully challenged prevalent historicist and formalist musical approaches’ – is one that should therefore, in this context, not pass without comment. Such a scholarly approach has no doubt enriched some aspects of our understanding of opera in society, but I worry that it can also serve as an excuse for music scholars to avoid in-depth engagement with the music altogether. It is self-evidently true that much of the meaning and peculiar affective force of opera is to be found in the music as much as in the text, or more particularly, in the interconnections between both.

However, Halliwell’s focus may have been drawn more towards the libretto of these works because the musical aspects of these works are also the least overtly Australian in character. The kinds of contemporary compositional styles one most frequently encounters in Australian operas are essentially international in origin and character. This book is at its most interesting and provocative when considering the ways and means by which Australian opera composers have nevertheless tried to engage with, or allude to, Indigenous cultures. Today such attempts might also face the added challenge of likely accusations of cultural appropriation.

This in turn points to an overarching problem that Halliwell himself alludes to in the preface. Musical attempts at expressing, let alone defining, an Australian national identity will always be uncertain and unstable, caught as they will ever be between the echoes of the global cultures that initially European, and now more recent, migrants have brought with them to these shores, and the Indigenous cultures they largely ignored or usurped in the process. Ultimately, it is no surprise (nor damning criticism) to note that Halliwell does not in the end offer a compelling overarching view of the current state or future direction of contemporary Australian opera. Indeed, as he notes himself, ‘[i]f there is one aspect that perhaps stands out in this journey through recent Australian opera, it is the wide variety of subject matter and musical styles displayed in the operas that have been discussed’. His survey serves to remind us, above all, that no nation (but especially ours) can be an island entire of itself. In these days of rising xenophobia in Australian public life, that is no bad note for us to hear. 

American novelist Barbara Kingsolver is renowned for her ability to infuse her fiction with her politics, in particular a passionate concern for nature and the environment. Prodigal Summer, published in 2000, is a celebration of the relationship between humans and nature; Flight Behaviour, published in 2012, is about climate change. No surprise then that her latest novel, Unsheltered, is set during two periods of scientific upheaval – the 1870s and the present – in which humans are confronted by the undeniable evidence of their own limitations. ‘I wanted,’ Kingsolver said, ‘to look at a paradigm shift, at how people behave at these moments of history when all the rules they trusted to hold true suddenly don’t apply anymore.’

There are parallel narratives in Unsheltered, told in alternating chapters. Both are set in the same house in Vineland, New Jersey, which is in a state of total disrepair. In the story set in the present, Willa and Iano, in their mid-fifties, live there with both Iano’s sick, irascible father, Nick, and their rebellious twenty-something daughter Tig. Iano, an academic, has recently lost his tenured position and is now a poorly paid junior lecturer. Willa, a journalist, has also recently lost her job. When their son Zeke’s partner dies, his newborn baby, Dusty, comes to live with them too.

In the story set in the 1870s, the house is occupied by Thatcher Greenwood, a new science teacher at the local school, his beautiful, petulant wife, Rose, his mother-in-law, Aurelia, and Rose’s younger sister, Polly. Rose refuses to leave the house, which was built by her father, despite its condition. Meanwhile, Thatcher’s attempt to teach his students about Darwin’s theory of evolution is stymied by the headmaster, Cutler, who (like most people in the provincial town, including its founder, Landis) regards Darwin’s views as heretical. Thatcher’s only comfort lies in his friendship with his neighbour, Mary Treat, a scientist and writer with whom he has a strong rapport. Treat is a real historical figure, as are many other characters who interact with the (fictional) Greenwood family.

The concept of shelter is central to the book. In the most literal sense, Willa’s and Thatcher’s families are both at risk of becoming unsheltered as their houses collapse around them. Neither family has the shelter of job security – Iano is on a yearly contract, as is Thatcher, whose adherence to Darwin’s ideas puts the renewal of his teaching contract in doubt. Kingsolver is concerned also with the shelter that love – romantic, familial, or platonic – can provide. Willa and Iano’s love gives them strength; the troubled Tig finally finds peace in her love for her boyfriend, Jorges, and for Dusty; and Thatcher, whose wife is no comfort to him, finds solace in ‘the shelter of [Mary’s] human arms’.

Equally significant is the metaphorical shelter of long-held beliefs. Both stories are set in a time of historical flux, when people need to adapt, and abandon old ideas, to survive. In the 1870s, Darwin’s theories challenged traditional beliefs in the supremacy of humans over animals. Vineland’s citizens are ‘terrified witless at the prospect of shedding comfortable beliefs and accepting new ones’. Today, as Tig (whose views, like Mary Treat’s, reflect Kingsolver’s) reminds Willa, people refuse to accept climate change or the fact that the earth’s resources are finite. In response to Willa’s bewilderment that, despite having done ‘everything right in life’, she and Iano are almost destitute, she explains that, ‘The rules have changed’, and the secret to happiness (and survival) is to lower your expectations and consume less.

Kingsolver draws other parallels between the United States in the late nineteenth century and today. The country then, emerging from the Civil War, was deeply divided. Cutler’s call for ‘a return to fundamentals’ to heal the country’s wounds sounds familiar, as does Mary’s warning that, ‘When people fear the loss of what they know, they will follow any tyrant who promises to restore the old order’. Effigies of Darwin swing from the trees as the crowd yells, ‘Lock him up’. The megalomaniacal Landis, with his ‘ruddy cheeks and an odd flop of hair’ bears an uncanny resemblance to the current US president.

Barbara Kingsolver (photo via Depauw University)Unsheltered is also about what Kingsolver describes as ‘the heart-enlargening earthquake of family life’; her portrayal, largely through Willa, of the ups and downs of family life is highly convincing. Willa must contend with the inevitable tensions when different generations live under the same (leaking) roof, with the corrosive impact of sibling rivalry (Zeke and Tig are in constant conflict) and with the impact of a newborn on a family. Despite those challenges, it is clear that Willa derives great satisfaction from her love for her family, and her efforts to protect them.

In Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver has once again created a memorable and deeply moving narrative, at the same time exploring enduring themes as well as topical issues such as climate change. The concept of shelter, and what it means to lose it, is critical. Just as those in the nineteenth century were compelled to abandon the false shelter of old ideas in order to see the truth, so, she argues, must we.

‘Without shelter,’ Mary tells Thatcher, ‘we stand in daylight.’

An essay at the heart of this collection, ‘Against Motherhood Memoirs’ by Maria Tumarkin, is not as insistent as its title suggests. Tumarkin, interested in ‘fissures and de-fusion’, troubles the awkward spots in her analysis. While reading Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015) – which places ‘motherhood and queerness side by side’ with autotheory and what Nelson calls ‘post-shame’ autobiographical writing – Tumarkin describes being ‘beside herself’ with exhilaration.

In 1952, Marion May Campbell’s father was killed in an apocalyptic accident when his World War II RAAF Dakota was knocked out of control by contact with a waterspout and was ‘unable to effect recovery’. There were no survivors and little wreckage. The outmoded Dakota was on loan to the CSIRO to conduct experiments in artificial rainmaking that required flying into turbulent cumulonimbus clouds. ‘Rainmaking is the work of the Devil,’ his daughter heard. Had the radio physicists on those flights discovered how to make it rain over drought-stricken areas of Australia, they would have been hailed as heroes. As it was, his grieving widow received a nasty anonymous letter intimating that the crew got what they deserved for ‘interfering with nature’.

In 1996 the pre-eminent political economist Susan Strange published her final book, The Retreat of the State. Strange had dedicated most of her career to studying the ability of the state to tame the power of international finance. The nexus between state and firm had empowered the United States for more than a century; Washington reconstructed the world order after 1945, resurrecting its former enemies, Tokyo and Berlin, to be behemoths once again. For Strange, the battle was lost in the late twentieth century: the state, she asserts, was headlong in a ‘strategic retreat’, captured by the tsunami of global capital.

Michael Hofmann’s home territory is language, while his life is extraterritorial. He was born in Germany, went to school in England, now lives in Germany, but teaches in North America. He has also made a living out of working between languages, translating scores of texts from German into English. He is as well-known as a translator as he is as a poet. He has said some interesting things about his linguistic domicility. In one interview, he speaks of his problems with English: for him it’s a ‘class trap, a dialect trap, a feeling trap’. German doesn’t have such heffalump traps, he feels; it offers greater scope for frankness (get it?), despite its wounds. Nevertheless, he continues to write poems in English.

June 22

And many happy returns of the day to Cyndi Lauper, 65,
once said to ‘dress funny’ and her voice likened to ‘rat’ (or ‘rat’s’),
singing the song ‘Money changes everything’, like a coarsened Bowie,
and to the nameless, ageless rat featherbedded in a mysteriously malfunctioning
Indian ATM machine in over a million mostly shredded rupees.

Michael Hofmann

Why do you write?

I have things I want to say and I am bold enough to hope that people may be interested in these things, and what I think of them.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

My dreams are extremely vivid, often upsetting, usually in full colour, but not always able to be summoned back to consciousness the next day. Which may not be a bad thing.

Which poets have most influenced you?

John Keats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Eric Beach, Myron Lysenko, Ania Walwicz, Elizabeth Bishop, Billy Collins, Charles Simic, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson – in that order through time; though tomorrow the answer would be a variation on this.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

No future for a poem without both craft and inspiration being involved, but no use for a poem unless it is first brought to life by inspiration (by breathing it in, then breathing it out).

There is something oddly Jesuitical about this arresting, if not quite thrilling, collection of essays in defence of Modernism (and so modernity). It may be Krishna that Amit Chaudhuri champions, rather than Catholic doctrine, or at least Krishna’s delight in ‘the infinitely tantalizing play, chicanery, and light and shade of the created universe’ (music to a Modernist’s ears, even if our essayist is an atheist), but all the same, I smell casuistry in the service of an orthodoxy. It makes at times for compelling reading.

I first encountered Stephen Jay Gould when I happened on one of his books in a bookshop during my late teens. Its unusual title, The Panda’s Thumb, caught my eye. The lead article channelled Charles Darwin’s approach to understanding the natural world, not through looking at perfect adaptations to the environment but through recognising that nature works with what it has, often inelegantly and always surprisingly. It was the perfect foil for creationist bunkum and appealed to the evolving sceptic in me. Gould’s writing opened up a complex, fascinating natural world, one that promised an endless source of wonder. The type of writing epitomised by Gould (who died in 2002) – accessible, intelligent, and entertaining – has inspired generations, and, I am glad to say, continues today in the likes of The Best Australian Science Writing 2018, edited by John Pickrell.

A few years ago I walked through a burning landscape with a young archaeobotanist, Xavier. We were in Arnhem Land, and the local Indigenous landowners had lit a low-intensity fire – a cool burn – to encourage new growth and reduce the fuel load around nearby settlements. The newly blackened landscape looked clean, even beautiful.

How does consciousness, the feeling of what happens, emerge from the object that Tim Parks describes in this engaging book as ‘a gruesome pinkish grey, vaguely intestinal lump’? Is mind identical with brain, is it secreted by it in some fashion, or does it, as some philosophers suggest, mysteriously ‘supervene’ on neural processes? Dualism is deeply unfashionable, and the rise of brain science has made materialism the new common sense, but how can the wisps of subjective experience be tethered to the electrochemical fizz inside our skulls? These questions define the mission of the many psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who study consciousness, but the prospect of a mutually satisfying answer continues to recede into the future.

During the 1960s and 1970s, student radicals protested that their places of learning were getting too close to industry and government. In 1970, Monash University students occupied the university’s Careers and Appointments Office to oppose the use of the university as a recruiting ground for companies profiting from the Vietnam War, and to protest its outreach to industry in the ill-fated Monash University Scientific and Industrial Complex. Universities could not pretend to be dedicated to truth and free enquiry, students argued, while operating hand in glove with capitalism and the ‘military-industrial complex’ that they ought to be critiquing.

Justice or vengeance? This is always the question raised by war crimes trials, although it might be noted that they are a relatively recent historical phenomenon. Some were proposed at the end of the Great War but never eventuated. The original and best known is, of course, Nuremberg at the end of World War II. Over the decades, there have been various prosecutions by the International Criminal Court, particularly concerning events in the Balkans in the 1990s, and by some one-off tribunals, such as in relation to the killings in Rwanda in 1994.