Sylvia Plath wrote her last letter to the American psychiatrist Dr Ruth Beuscher a week prior to her suicide on 11 February 1963. In it, Plath castigates herself for being guilty of ‘Idolatrous love’, a concept she drew from psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. ‘I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself,’ Plath writes, identifying the subsumption of her ego into her failed marriage at the heart of her unhappiness. The letter’s tone is self-lacerating – Plath diagnoses herself as ‘very narcissistic’, lacking ‘a mature identity’, and in the grip of a ‘ghastly defeatist cycle’ – and distraught, citing a ‘fear & vision of the worst’. It closes with a portentous image of her domestic life, made terrible with hindsight: ‘Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea,’ Plath wrote. A week later, she killed herself.

The letters from Plath to Beuscher – fourteen in all – offer an unvarnished insight into Plath’s psyche during the tumultuous end of her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes and the months leading up to her suicide. The correspondence is discomfortingly intimate; while no longer Beuscher’s patient, Plath made repeated entreaties for Beuscher to bill her for the letters, and her disclosures were clearly made within the confines of an implicit doctor–patient confidentiality. Plath had known Beuscher for a decade by the time she wrote her final letter. Beuscher first treated her in McLean Hospital in 1953, after the breakdown that formed the basis of her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963); she subsequently met with Plath for weekly therapy sessions early in her marriage to Hughes when the couple lived in Boston. After Plath and Hughes moved to England, Beuscher became a trusted confidant by correspondence – one to whom Plath wrote in increasing desperation after Hughes’s infidelity and ‘desertion’ of his young family.

 Sylvia Plath on a beach in Chatham, Massachusetts, 1954 (Photograph by Gordon Lameyer. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.)

With the permission of her daughter, Frieda Hughes, Plath’s letters to Beuscher are published for the first time, in the superbly edited, exhaustive The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956–1963. The existence of the letters – some 18,000 words in total – was revealed dramatically in 2017 when a book dealer listed them for sale alongside legible photographs that reverberated through the literary world. The letters offer explosive details of hitherto unknown episodes in Plath and Hughes’s marriage, including Plath’s disclosure that Hughes ‘beat [her] up physically’ a few days prior to a miscarriage in 1961, that Hughes taunted Plath about suicide – ‘he told me openly he wished me dead … I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love’ – and Plath’s observation that Hughes was antipathetic towards his son, Nicholas, calling him ‘ugly’ and a ‘usurper’.

Because Hughes destroyed Plath’s final journal, ostensibly to protect the couple’s children from its contents, the Beuscher letters offer the frankest record of Plath’s thoughts in the months before her suicide. They have also prompted a predictable rehashing of arguments that have been prosecuted with varying intensity since their peak in the 1970s, about Hughes’s culpability in Plath’s death – an argument that Frieda Hughes dismisses in her foreword: ‘while my father does not come out of these letters as a saint, neither does my mother’. Inevitably, the more sensational details of the Beuscher letters will ensure that the end of Plath’s life will dominate the reception of her final letters, too. Yet what compels in this volume is not only the portrait it offers of Plath’s descent, but also its view of her literary ascent, her marriage to Hughes, and the astonishing efficiency and energy with which the couple manifested their extraordinary literary careers.

 Sylvia Plath to Ruth Beuscher Smith, 4 February 1963, page 1 of 2 (photograph via Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections)

Sylvia Plath to Ruth Beuscher Smith, 4 February 1963, page 2 of 2 (photograph via Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections)

The first volume of Plath’s letters, published in late 2017, spanned Plath’s early education at Smith College, her Mademoiselle internship in New York, her Fulbright at Cambridge – where she first met Hughes at the ‘fatal party’ at Falcon Yard – and the early days of their marriage. Volume 2 picks up the day after Plath’s twenty-fourth birthday and ends a week before her death at thirty. Plath was a prolific correspondent: the letters in this volume alone total 575 letters to 108 recipients – an extraordinary number when considering the breakneck speed with which she composed her poems and the hefty volume of her personal diaries. Her most frequent correspondent is her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath, who served as Plath’s de facto secretary, mailing her poems to American magazines and helping to manage the couple’s affairs in the United States.

Plath’s missives to her mother are unfailingly chipper and practical; they contrast vividly with the poems she was writing at the same time, which she describes offhandedly as being ‘about cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes, ouija boards, hermits, fat spinsters, thin spinsters, ghosts’. She writes in hyperbolic, rhapsodic terms about married life: ‘I really don’t know how I existed before I met Ted,’ she tells her mother. She manages the household finances with military precision, joyfully totting up the earnings from their poems. Her literary ambitions and successes are chronicled in forensic detail, from her first appearance in The New Yorker to her excitement upon signing a contract with Heinemann for her first collection, The Colossus (1960). These milestones are supplemented with comprehensive footnotes by the volume’s editors, Steinberg and Kukil, allowing the reader to cross-reference the composition of Plath’s poems with developments in her daily life.

Yet Plath’s precocious accomplishments often take a backseat to her adulation of Hughes. She boasts about his every publication and accolade, casting herself as ‘his American agent’ and expressing supreme confidence in his genius. While she insists to her mother that there is ‘no question of rivalry’ between them, she is nonetheless relieved that Hughes experiences success before she does. When Auden, Stephen Spender, and Marianne Moore award the Poetry Centre First Publication prize to Hughes’s first volume, The Hawk in the Rain (1957), she writes: ‘I am so happy his book is accepted first. It will make it so much easier for me when mine is accepted.’ Flirting with mysticism, she consults tarot and horoscopes to foresee the couple’s literary future, predicting that Hughes ‘will be the best poet since Yeats & Dylan Thomas’ and that he ‘will win the Pulitzer some day’. Elsewhere, she declares ominously, ‘we are going to catapult to fame’.

 Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath Lilly, 6 November 1960 (photograph via Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana)

Sure enough, the fame Plath foresaw dawned. Flushed with their combined success, and with Plath pregnant with their second child, the couple bought Court Green, a house in North Tawton, Devon. Plath is initially ecstatic about her bucolic writing life with Hughes, which only makes the shock of his infidelity more acute when it arrives on the heels of the birth of their son. Hughes leaves Plath midway through a trip to Ireland to pursue his affair with Assia Wevill, whom Plath waspishly nicknames ‘Weavy Asshole’. Plath’s letters to Beuscher become desperate; she quickly reaches ‘a nadir, very grim’. Even in the throes of her deepest unhappiness, however, she is adamant about the primacy of writing in her life: ‘What I am not is a Penelope type … I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my children, but want my own life. I want to write books.’

Ostracised by the literary circles that once embraced her, and shunned by friends who side with Hughes, Plath finds herself snookered by the same notoriety she once sought. She oscillates between defiance – ‘my independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again’ – and devastation: ‘Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged,’ she asks Beuscher. In December 1962 – one of the coldest winters on record – she moved back to London with her children into a Primrose Hill flat once inhabited by Yeats. Less than two months later, after a frenzied burst of creativity in which she composed many of the great poems of Ariel (1965), often at the rate of one or more a day, she suicided.

 Sylvia Plath on Primrose Hill, June 1960 (Mortimer Rare Book Collection, Smith College Special Collections)

Stripped of the cheery optimism and pragmatic veneer that predominate her letters to her mother and friends, Plath’s overtures to Beuscher are a jolting reminder of the circumscribed lives women led in the sanitised 1950s. It is tragic that Plath did not live to see second-wave feminism usher in new freedoms for women, though her last letters testify powerfully to the claustrophobic discontents and gendered strictures of family life for women of the era. However, it is also hard to argue with Plath when she accuses herself of having given too much of herself over to her marriage, and her late epiphany that she made Hughes ‘both idol & father’ is excruciating. Even at the height of her disdain for Hughes’s cruelty and moral weakness, her admiration of his poetry endures. ‘Ted has … some of the inhumanity of the true genius that must kill to get what it wants,’ she says, proffering a partial exoneration. Yet the overwhelming impression left by Plath’s haunting last letters is of her own genius; as difficult as they are to read, they are a thundering reminder of her singular talent. It is a great relief when, after all her praise of Hughes, Plath writes to Beuscher a week before her death, ‘I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me.’ She was, and she did.

When Alan Rusbridger was a young journalist on the Cambridge Evening News, he fell in love with a university leturer. One night, after they moved in together, there was a knock on their door. A reporter and photographer from the Sunday Mirror wanted to tell the story of their romance to the four million people who bought the British tabloid each week. Why? The lecturer’s late father had, years earlier, been on television. Rusbridger imagined the headline: ‘Daughter of quite famous man has affair.’

The Sunday Mirror team didn’t react well to being politely turned away. ‘We can do this nice or we can do it nasty,’ said the reporter, who sat outside the house for twenty-four hours, occasionally leaning on the doorbell. A week later, he and the photographer returned and tried again. The story was never written, but for Rusbridger – whose career thus far had involved covering council meetings and flower shows – the experience was eye-opening. As he says in Breaking News: The remaking of journalism and why it matters now, he had learned ‘what it was like to have journalism done to you’.

To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2018 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite books of 2018 – all published by other companies.

Nathan Hollier

Deep Time Dreaming by Billy Griffiths (Black Inc.)Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia (Black Inc., reviewed in ABR, 4/18) relates the physical and intellectual challenges, adventures, innovations, and discoveries of modern Australian archaeology. In telling this story, commencing in the late 1950s, Billy Griffiths also discusses the social, political, and philosophical changes and issues that this archaeological activity has subsequently contributed to, or been affected by. Great knowledge, clear thinking, careful evaluation, and stylish exposition bring to light questions of existential significance: ‘To dream of deep time … propels us into a global perspective and allows us to see ourselves as a species. It also asks us to respect the deep past as a living heritage.’

Nathan Hollier is Director of Monash University Publishing.

Michael Heyward

‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past,’ said William Faulkner. He might have been speaking of Billy Griffiths’s Deep Time Dreaming, an utterly compelling mixture of memoir, biography, history, and science. Griffiths tells the tale of how, thanks to the work of some brilliant archaeologists and their guides and collaborators, we have been able to glimpse not just the ancient human history of this continent, but its living signature, too. Each time Griffiths’s story got older, it found new ways to begin. 

Michael Heyward is Publisher at Text Publishing.

Nikki Christer

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing)The first thing to say about Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner (Text Publishing) – an unforgettable book – is how striking it is. It has the sort of cover that spawns a zillion copies with its powerful simplicity. Hats off to the publishers for that. The second thing to say about this book is that it’s absolutely brilliant. The writing is clear-eyed, filled with humanity, subtlety, and grace. Krasnostein loves her subject and this shines through on every page. I would have loved to have published it; we were one of the bidders but lost out to Text, which published it impeccably. I was cheering from the sidelines to see Sarah pick up a swag of awards.

Nikki Christer is Group Publishing Director at Penguin Random House.

Terri-ann White

Blakwork by Alison Whittaker (Magabala Books)Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork (Magabala Books), even in its more benign moments, is an intense thump to the body. This is because, through poetry and observation, Whittaker unmakes and remakes so much in her narratives by working the language hard. The interposing within a framework of ‘work’ categories yields erudition, worn lightly, alongside experimentation and irony and tenderness. I had to read slowly, so richly dense was it with history and family and people’s lives; encompassing how language assists in oppressing people and how it can also recover worlds of hope and self-determination. A delight, by a young writer of distinction.

Terri-ann White is Director of UWA Publishing.

Alice Grundy

Beautiful Revolutionary by Laura Elizabeth Woollett (Scribe)In Beautiful Revolutionary (Scribe, 10/18), Laura Elizabeth Woollett creates unforgettable characters. Months later, I can still see and hear them vividly. Beautiful Revolutionary is the story of the cult that lead to the Jonestown Massacre, the largest intentional loss of American life in one event until 9/11. The research and writing are impeccable, yet still warm and immediate, especially her depiction of Evelyn, a young woman drawn into the inner circle of the People’s Temple.

Alice Grundy is an associate publisher at Brio Books.

Phillipa McGuinness

On Disruption by Katharine Murphy (Melbourne University Publishing)One tiny book, a long essay really, punched above its weight and has not left me since I read it. ‘Timely’ is a standby word for blurb writers, but Katharine Murphy’s On Disruption (Melbourne University Press) really is just that, an intervention for our ‘post-truth age’. Not all journalists are great writers, but Murphy is, and she’s not afraid to turn the searchlight on herself and her profession. Pressure from without is also pressure from within, and this book shows how high the stakes are. That she is able to serve as ‘a river guide in white water’ is to all our benefits.

Phillipa McGuinness is Publisher at NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press.

Catherine Milne

The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted by Robert Hillman (Text Publishing)The Bookshop of the Broken Hearted (Text Publishing), by Robert Hillman, is an Australian gem: wise, tender, melancholy, gentle – simple yet undeniably powerful. The story of decent Tom Hope and haunted Hannah Babel rang as pure and true as a bell. While the novel doesn’t shy away from showing the darkness of history and the inexplicable cruelty of people, it also shows us that love can help us through – love and books. Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives (Hamish Hamilton, 3/18) is, in a way, its polar opposite: a bravura achievement, dazzling, complex, layered, thought-provoking and mind-stretchingly clever – but equally compelling.

Catherine Milne is Publisher and Head of Fiction at HarperCollins Publishers Australia.

Aviva Tuffield

Any Ordinary Day by Leigh Sales (Hamish Hamilton)I’m choosing two books that affected me deeply – divergent in style and approach, but both challenging us to imaginatively consider the lives of others. Alison Whittaker’s Blakwork proves, yet again, that she is one of the sharpest minds around. This coruscating collection plays with form and style, throughout centring Indigenous voices and experiences, and decolonising language. It’s bold and unapologetic, slicing through the hypocrisies of settler colonialism. Leigh Sales’s Any Ordinary Day (Hamish Hamilton, 10/18) undid me repeatedly with its empathetic stories of how people cope when ‘the worst thing happens’. Sales turns the spotlight on her own personal life as well as her professional one, interrogating the role of journalists in reporting tragedy and trauma.

Aviva Tuffield is a publisher at the University of Queensland Press.

Meredith Curnow

Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, edited by Anita Heiss (Black Inc.)Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia (Black Inc.), edited by Anita Heiss, is a revelation, and it shouldn’t be. Bringing together experiences from voices new and old, young and mature, this is a collection to return to, not only because we cannot change what we ignore, but also for inspiration. We See the Stars (Allen & Unwin), a début from Kate van Hooft, deftly explores my favourite trait, kindness, as a young boy attempts to broaden his engagement with the small, disturbing, and noisy world in which he lives. Tension builds and the reader is lead to an open ending, or is it?

Meredith Curnow is a publisher at Penguin Random House Australia.

Barry Scott

Blue Lake by David Sornig (Scribe)David Sornig’s Blue Lake: Finding Dudley Flats and the West Melbourne Swamp (Scribe), absorbed me on so many levels. Sornig brings a novelist’s eye to his acute portrait of Elsie and the other fringe dwellers living on the edge of Melbourne. During the Great Depression, such outcasts built humpies and scavenged from rubbish tips. Like Janet Frame in Owls Do Cry (1961), Sornig understands the treasures of the spirit to be found in the compromised wastelands of our cities. In fiction, Angela Meyer’s A Superior Spectre (Ventura) grappled beautifully with the dilemma of longevity versus soul.

Barry Scott is Publisher at Transit Lounge.

David Musgrave

I Love Poetry by Michael Farrell (Giramondo)As a publisher, teacher, and writer, I have little time to read for pleasure, so I’m fairly choosy about what I read. Michael Farrell’s I Love Poetry (Giramondo) is one of the stronger books to have come out recently. Farrell’s last few books have shown a real maturation in his voice. Paradoxically enough, it is his more personal and less characteristically playful poems that mark this development in his work. I also enjoyed Maria Tumarkin’s collection of essays Axiomatic (Brow Books, 9/18) for their intensity, honesty, and the Eastern European sensibility from which they derive.

David Musgrave is Publisher at Puncher & Wattmann.

Mathilda Imlah

In the Garden of the Fugitives by Ceridwen Dovey (Hamish Hamilton)I seem to be taken with all things igneous this year. I devoured Ceridwen Dovey’s In the Garden of the Fugitives: rich, strange, mesmerising. Startling, in fact, as Dovey always seems to be. I note now that it’s sitting on my shelf beside Anna Burns’s Milkman, Sally Rooney’s Normal People, and Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetry, all having a gentle conversation in the way they do. I also read Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist: A mind on fire (Hamish Hamilton, 10/18) in a single sitting and at arm’s length. The ability to bear such forensic witness must exert a terrific toll: it is a harrowing read and utterly riveting.

On a personal note, I think we all suffered a great loss in the poet and activist Candy Royalle, who died suddenly, and far, far too soon, in June 2018. Her first muscular and uncompromising collection, A trillion tiny awakenings, towards which she had been working for many years, was published posthumously by UWAP. Vale, Candy.

Mathilda Imlah is the Picador Publisher. 

Sam Cooney

The Lebs by Michael Mohammed Ahmad (Hachette)The locally published book that most knocked me sideways this year was Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (Hachette, 3/18). We recognise the characters of this book – these Western Sydney boys and girls and men and women, these ‘lebs’ and ‘fobs’ – and feel as though we know them. Yet most of us don’t know them or their stories. Michael Mohammed Ahmad drags us inside the worlds of these characters. I just wish all realist fiction were as unapologetic in its approach.

Sam Cooney is Publisher at Brow Books.

It is hard to think of a more distinctive and idiosyncratic author than Western Australian Shaun Tan. Winner of the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children’s literature, Tan’s work has also been recognised by numerous awards in speculative fiction, illustration, and children’s books, including an Academy Award in 2011 (for the animated short adaptation of The Lost Thing). By sheer force of imagination and talent, Tan seems to have carved out a unique niche for himself, one that hovers between the worlds of images and words, children and adults, extravagant fantasy and the most visceral realism. In his latest book, Tales from the Inner City, Tan brings his focus to the fissure between the natural and human worlds.

Many of Tan’s previous books feature an overpowering and oppressively industrial landscape, where organic life often takes an alien, uncontrolled, and distinctly unfamiliar form. The Lost Thing (2000) hybridises an octopus/hermit crab and a teapot/steam boiler, The Red Tree (2001) grows unexpectedly from a bedroom floor, while origami birds and fish flourish in The Arrival (2006).

You probably own a smartphone. Chances are it’s in your pocket right now, or at least within arm’s reach – don’t pick it up. Fight the habit. Besides, you’ve probably checked it in the last fifteen minutes. If you are an average user, intentionally or not, you will spend three to four hours looking at its screen today. If you did check your phone after the second sentence, then well done for making it back to this piece, although (according to some research) it probably took you about twenty-five minutes to refocus.

Acknowledgment is the first step to recovery: we are not in control of how we use our phones. It’s not a case of no longer being in control – we never were. Buried among all the other revelations about the dark sides of technology has been a growing awareness that software is designed to be addictive. ‘Persuasive technology’ is the sanitised name Silicon Valley gives to technology that acts to change the behaviour of the user. Think of brightly coloured app icons that lure unthinking taps, or notifications delivered at random time intervals to reinforce the habit of checking your phone or social media. They are the same kind of psychological hacking techniques used by the makers of the pokies. Like corporate Dr Frankensteins, the tech giants are in the business of collecting eyeballs – and screw the ethics.

This is the first of a five-volume series, apparently all by David Kemp, with the general title Australian Liberalism. The second volume, A Free Country: Australians’ search for utopia 1861–1901, is planned by Melbourne University Publishing next year. Kemp was senior lecturer and then Professor of Politics at Monash University until 1990, and after that a minister in John Howard’s government. He is a Liberal Party insider – his father was founder of the Institute of Public Affairs – and in this project he has the advantage of a lifetime spent coming to grips with the long trajectory of Australian liberalism.

‘Civilization’, a seemingly tranquil notion, has always somehow managed to start quarrels and divide the room. In the classical world, where the concept was largely shaped, it managed, more startlingly, to divide the human race itself. On the one hand, so the notion appeared to imply, were people whose speech you could more or less understand, whose customs and habits roughly resembled your own, who seemed capable of ‘civility’ – of living peaceably within what the Romans knew as the civitas – and thus of aspiring to higher things. Then, regrettably, there was that other mob, whose jabbering talk as they passed by you on the streets defied comprehension, though their grosser defects – crudity, cruelty, savagery – could readily be imagined. These the Greeks chose to describe as barbarians, people who couldn’t speak properly: stutterers. They came from nobody knew where and were doomed to remain perpetual outsiders.

In 2004, New York-based publisher Akashic Books released Brooklyn Noir, a collection of short fiction written under a specific brief. Stories had to be set in that neighbourhood and feature noir themes: simmering familial revenge, cheating and double-crossing, sexual betrayal, domestic discord, murderous trysts, down-at-heel detectives. Authors rose to the challenge by focusing on communities like Williamsburg, Bensonhurst, Park Slope, and Bedford–Stuyvesant. This was small-time crime on a localised level. A clever idea, which editor Tim McLoughlin split into four sections: Old School Brooklyn, New School Brooklyn, Cops & Robbers, and Backwater Brooklyn.

The tall, handsome, socially adept if emotionally reticent scion of a wealthy, well-connected family and the crumpled, physically unimpressive, excitable son of an alcoholic travelling salesman seem to be an unlikely pair to form a long-standing friendship. For both James Laughlin and Thomas Lanier ‘Tennessee’ Williams, however, this relationship was among the most important in their lives.

Billy McMahon, Australia’s twentieth prime minister, held the post for less than two years (March 1971–December 1972). In surveys of both public esteem and professional opinion, he is generally ranked as our least accomplished prime minister. He is also, until now, the only prime minister for whom there has been no serious biography published. No one, perhaps, thought it worth the effort.

Where are you happiest?

At night I sit on the brick patio of a beach house at Currarong with a garden of flannel flowers and kangaroo paws. I listen to the ocean through a windbreak of low eucalypts and banksias, just a hundred paces away.

Are you a vivid dreamer?

In a recurring nightmare, I’m about to sit for a university exam in English or History. I haven’t been to any lectures and I can’t find the exam room.

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is open

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, one of the world’s premier awards for an original short story, is now open. The Jolley Prize is worth a total of $12,500. This year the winner will receive $5,000, the runner-up, $3,000, the third-placed author, $2,000. Three commended stories will share the remaining $2,500. The judges on this occasion are Maxine Beneba Clarke, John Kinsella, and Beejay Silcox.

The three shortlisted stories will appear in our August 2019 issue, followed by the commended stories. The overall winner will be announced at a ceremony in August. As with our other literary prizes, the Jolley Prize is open to writers anywhere in the world (stories must be in English).

Terms and Conditions are available on our website; and we have also updated our Frequently Asked Questions. Writers have until April 15 to enter.

The Jolley Prize is fully funded by ABR Patron Ian Dickson. We thank him warmly.

Palace Letters

Margaret and Gough Whitlam at The Lodge, 1973 (photograph via National Archives of Australia/Wikimedia Commons)

Bravo again to Jenny Hocking and her colleagues for ‘maintaining their rage’ about Queen Elizabeth’s indefinite embargo on the release of the so-called ‘Palace letters’ – the correspondence between Queen Elizabeth and Governor-General John Kerr pertaining to Kerr’s dismissal of the Whitlam government in 1975.

Jenny Hocking – emeritus professor at Monash University and Gough Whitlam’s biographer – initiated the case in the Federal Court of Australia two years ago. The recent appeal hearing before the Federal Court is the latest chapter in this sorry tale. (A ruling is expected in early 2019.) Hocking’s successive articles in The Guardian are essential reading for Australian citizens, republican or not.

Writing in The Guardian on December 16, Professor Hocking stated: ‘Far from the Palace remaining aloof, Kerr’s papers reveal that the Palace was already involved in Kerr’s deliberations leading to Whitlam’s dismissal.’ Previously, she had written: ‘These letters are a critical part of the history of the dismissal … which all Australians have a right to know. It is utterly inappropriate for any independent nation that such historical documents can remain secret from us at the behest of the Queen.’

Hocking also deplored the ‘gatekeeping’ role of the National Archives of Australia, which has spent approximately half a million dollars on the ‘Palace letters’ case. The NAA, she opined, ‘was not designed to protect and maintain hidden histories’.

Australian monarchists fawn over the endless princes and princesses, and the nation spends a fortune entertaining them, but others know that sections of the British Establishment treat Australians with contempt – none more so, in this context, than the Queen of Australia (ironically so designated by the Whitlam government, two years before its removal).

Judith Rodriguez (1936–2018)

The literary community was saddened by the recent death of Judith Rodriguez, aged eighty-two. Her contribution was extensive, primarily as a poet, of course, but also as a teacher, activist, publisher, and print-marker. She had a long association with PEN International. She taught at La Trobe University from 1969 to 1985 and at Deakin from 1998 to 2003.

The PEN International Women Writers’ Committee put it well: ‘Judith was a fierce campaigner for social justice, a lover of the written word, an inspiring poet, and a true internationalist who has lived a life of commitment and service both within and beyond many borders.’

David Malouf, a lifelong friend, launched Judith’s fifteenth collection, The Feather Boy and Other Poems (Puncher & Wattmann), a week before her death on November 22. Our review will follow.

Judith was a frequent contributor to this magazine, commencing in July 1978 (our second issue). She last wrote for us in 2010.

Harriet McKnight (1988–2018)

ABR was saddened to learn of the death of the talented writer and editor Harriet McKnight. McKnight’s powerful short story ‘Crest’ was shortlisted for the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. She was also shortlisted for the 2014 Overland VU Short Story Prize and the 2016 Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize. She was an editor at The Canary Press for several years before moving to Darwin. McKnight’s début novel, Rain Birds (Black Inc.), was reviewed in our October 2017 issue by Gretchen Shirm, who noted that McKnight wrote ‘beautifully about people’.

The Calibre Essay Prize is closing!

Entries in the Calibre Essay Prize close on 14 January 2019. The total prize money is $7,500, and the judges are J.M. Coetzee, Anna Funder, and Peter Rose.

Gerald Murnane wins with Border Districts

Gerald Murnane (photograph by Ian Hill)

‘Poets are tough and can profit from the most dreadful experiences,’ W.H. Auden once wrote in an essay on Shakespeare. None, it seems, is more dreadful than rejection. Poets can brood over a rejection slip for decades. Gerald Murnane, for instance, recalls: ‘I wrote only poetry in my mid-twenties. I had three poems published in obscure places, but the dozen and more that I sent to mainstream publications were all rejected.’

Murnane, who has apparently finished writing all the fiction he had been ‘driven to write’, has now returned to poetry. The result is Green Shadows and Other Poems, which he started in 2014. In the same Author’s Note, Murnane writes: ‘Even after more than sixty years spent writing, I still find the process itself mysterious and awesome, and nothing has so mystified and awed me as the sudden coming into being of these fully-formed poems in the very last years of my career.’

Murnane has a small but influential readership. Last month, his novel Border Districts won the Prime Minister’s Literary Award for fiction, earning the author $80,000.

Giramondo is the publisher of Green Shadows and Border Districts.

Film tickets

At Eternity's GateThis month, thanks to Palace Films, ten new or renewing ABR subscribers will win a double pass to Paolo Sorrentino’s Loro, a film about Silvio Berlusconi. Thanks to Transmission Films, another ten will win a double pass to At Eternity’s Gate, starring Willem Dafoe as Vincent van Gogh.

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..

Summer issue

While you enjoy the January–February double issue, look out for our mid-summer online issue, which will contain a dozen reviews. Meanwhile, good wishes for 2019 from everyone at ABR.

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.

ARC controversy

Dear Editor,

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 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.

During his 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama declared that the story of American history is of countless people striving toward ‘a more perfect union’, that most utopian of goals enshrined in the nation’s Constitution. In These Truths, a one-volume account of the entirety of American history since European settlement, Jill Lepore praises Obama’s unifying rhetoric, but believes the tide of American history is against him.

As we await the fate of the United Kingdom in its tortuous process of extricating itself from the European Union, what better time to produce a provocatively titled text purporting to trace nothing less than the rise and decline of the British nation?

The world’s best-known espionage officer, Vladimir Putin, would relish Christopher Andrew’s account of the role of his fellow practitioners at the 1816 Congress of Vienna. The secret services of France, Prussia, Britain, Russia, and Austria jostled to monitor the trysts of courtesans with the statesmen assembled in the Austro-Hungarian capital to carve post-Napoleonic Europe into spheres of influence. In some cases, these delicate sources were bestowing favours serially. More than one secret service was gleaning the pillow talk. The Russian Princess Catherine Bagration, mother of Austrian Foreign Minister Klemens von Metternich’s illegitimate daughter, was receiving at least two, including Tsar Alexander I. Metternich’s then current mistress, the Duchess of Sagan, entertained, separately, two British diplomats, including the British Ambassador to Vienna. How piquant, that Metternich deployed his own agents to keep abreast of the duchess’s other liaisons.

On 6 October 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report warning of the dangers of surpassing a 1.5° Celsius rise from pre-industrial levels in average global temperatures. They are many, and dire. To halt at 1.5°, carbon emissions need to fall by forty per cent globally by 2030, and reach net zero by 2050. There had been other reports, but this one, according to seasoned Washington Post climate reporter Eugene Robinson, struck ‘a different tone’, blending ‘weary fatalism’ and ‘hair-on-fire alarm’ as it pointed to failing fisheries and crops, thriving diseases and disasters, and rampant displacement and political instability.

The morning I begin to read Insomnia, a darkly thrilling beauty of a book, the sky turns a duckblue albumen. Domestic hush and personal restlessness coexist. This tension of dualities recurs within Marina Benjamin’s philosophical and poetic reckoning with the state of insomnia.

I am not a fellow sufferer. There was a mere dalliance with insomnia after the birth of my children, stayed by drugs prescribed by a vigilant obstetrician. Some nights are pockmarked with sleeplessness, including a handful during the reading of this book.

Sleeplessness, according to Benjamin, was termed agrypnoctic by the Ancient Greeks. Its roots lie in the words ‘wakeful’, ‘to pursue’, and ‘sleep’, while insomnia, its habitual, insistent state, emerges from the Latin word insomnis. She describes it as ‘involv[ing] the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.’ The writer’s textual self-portrait is of ‘a black hole, void of substance, greedy with yearning’. ‘Love, longing and insomnia’ may well be an alternative title to this book.

Back from the Brink is the second volume of a projected four-volume series that investigates the performance of the four Howard governments (1996–2007). The first dealt with the Liberal– National Party coalition’s election in 1996 and their first year in power. The work under review focuses on the period from ‘January 1997 when the Workplace Relations Act 1996 came into operation until the Aston by-election’ in July 2001. Back from the Brink is based on papers originally presented at a conference organised by UNSW Canberra, held at the Museum of Australian Democracy, Old Parliament House, on 14–15 November 2017.

Perhaps the most encouraging sign in this Puncher & Wattmann collection of critical essays on contemporary Australian poets is the prominent ‘1’ on its front cover, promising that this will be the first in a series. Given that last year’s Contemporary Australian Poetry anthology by the same publisher featured more than two hundred poets, only fourteen of whom are featured for discussion here, this suggests the possibility of a sizeable number of subsequent volumes. The value of such a project cannot be understated: as the editors note in their introduction, the contemporary Australian poetry scene is a particularly vital area of our literature, and the task of ‘grappling with [its] bewildering diversity’ is insufficiently addressed by our current review culture, as well as in academic publications and research funding. It is also noticeably neglected in ‘literary’ forums such as writers’ festivals.

Nothing seems real     yet I’m willing
to play ‘the real’ game for ones I love
and when I’m sick I go get pills
but more and more hovering above it I’m
and then is it a question of for who that’s why
I no longer have memories I don’t care about them
though I can contrive more but I don’t
belong in them anymore     ‘Do you really think

Almost before drawing breath, we meet two troupes of Indian magicians. One appears in the court of the Emperor Jahangir, early seventeenth-century Mughal ruler and aficionado of magic. In the first of twenty-eight tricks, this troupe of seven performers sprout trees from a cluster of plant pots before the emperor’s eyes, the luminous foliage heaving with fruits and songbirds. Four hundred years later, a group of jadoowallahs (street magicians) charm a hand-to-mouth living from the urban sprawl of modern-day New Delhi. In a small park, they levitate for audiences and magically escape the binds of knotted ropes. With similar – but less spectacular – effect to that woven by the performers of a Mughal court, they spirit a shrub-like tree out of what seems like thin air.

‘It is arguably the most famous play on the planet’, writes Jonathan Croall in his introduction to this absorbing study of how the play and its eponym have gripped the imagination across the ages – and, as far as this book is concerned, particularly across the last seventy years. Whether for actor or director, Hamlet has always been ‘a supreme challenge’, making huge demands on those bringing it to theatrical life.

This well-illustrated volume documents through its analysis of art exhibitions the massive rise of Australia’s art gallery attendances over a period of more than forty years. Before the late 1960s, only a few hundred thousand people visited Australian galleries each year; now many millions flock to them. The popularity is largely attributable to well-promoted special exhibitions. This book concentrates on exhibitions of Australian art and demonstrates how curators and directors helped to rewrite Australia’s venerable art history.

The story of art could be framed as a narrative of tension between the boundless creative imagination of artists and the practical limitations – including instability, scarcity, even toxicity – of their materials. As master paint-maker David Coles explains in this wonderful book, the vividness and permanence of artists’ colours have never been assured.

Anne Elvey’s White on White and Reneé Pettitt-Schipp’s The Sky Runs Right Through Us both offer ideas of unsettlement in contemporary Australia; Elvey’s is the unsettlement brought by the arrival of colonists, whereas Pettitt-Schipp explores the unsettlement associated with denying arrival. In White on White, Elvey explores the limitations and downfalls of colonialism, and the paradoxical act of ‘building a falling’ that settlement represents. Despite its title, the collection is about the co-existence of whiteness and colour, as in the line, ‘On my desk the whiteout / is shelved beside the pens’. This line is also telling as it is about imprints and markings existing beside modes of erasure. In the prose poem ‘School days’, readers are introduced to the speaker’s skin that is ‘peach and cream with a blue undernote […] the colour of my soul’, which a ‘drop of ink’ would mortally stain. Here, Elvey invokes a thread running through the collection: the potential for ink, the medium for writing and textuality, to be fraught with sin and moral complications. At these moments, readers may reflect on the fact that it was white settlers who brought written language to Australia, with all of its blessings and burdens.

When I went to live in London in 1970, the dissolution of the British Empire had yet to reach its final stages. (While Fiji became independent that year, Hong Kong would not be transferred to China till 1997). The Commonwealth seemed like a glorious roseate hue, a spectacular sunset lingering after the sun had gone down: a device enabling the British to kid themselves that their world hadn’t really changed. But it had, deeply. To parody Voltaire on the Holy Roman Empire: the British Commonwealth had become neither British, nor common, nor wealthy.

As Philip Murphy shows in The Empire’s New Clothes, the institution had recently undergone real change. Whereas in the 1950s Commonwealth prime ministers’ biennial conferences were still centred on the ‘old Dominions’ – the official photograph always showing Sir Robert Menzies in his element, standing near the Queen – now the access of new members began to transform the institution. For too long the British had been inclined to think of emergent African states as ‘self-governing’ rather than independent. But soon the African tail began, improbably, to wag the British bulldog.

Gareth Evans diagnosed the affliction of leaving government as relevance deprivation syndrome. For those who worked in the Obama administration, leaving the White House must have presented deeper maladies: the bewildering success of a reviled political opponent and a profound sense of missed opportunities. Two recently released memoirs by former Obama staffers grapple with this reality in very different ways.

The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House, by speechwriter Ben Rhodes, is a serious and observational account of working as a part of the president’s foreign policy team, but penned with an eye to history and the author’s place in it. Rhodes joined the fledgling Obama campaign in the spring of 2007 and quickly rose to Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications through an uncanny ability to anticipate what Obama would want to say or do on a particular issue – a kind of ‘mind meld’ with the president. Thus, Rhodes was privy to, and occasionally shaped, the president’s thinking on foreign policy across his eight years in office (2009–17).

Barack Obama promised a new beginning in American foreign policy: thoughtful, idealistic, cosmopolitan; a clean break from the neo-conservative adventurism of George W. Bush’s presidency (2001–9) and its catastrophes; an end to America’s moral transgressions in the War on Terror – torture, extrajudicial detention, abuse; a less bellicose, more conciliatory approach to allies and enemies alike. Yet, in office, Obama’s foreign policy achievements were neither particularly transformative nor inspiring. In baseball parlance, they consisted mainly of hitting ‘singles’ and ‘doubles’ – ending an unpopular war in Iraq, normalising US relations with Cuba, signing a nuclear deal with Iran. Avoiding catastrophic errors. The lofty rhetoric of Obama’s first year in office was reduced to a truism masquerading as a doctrine: ‘Don’t do stupid shit.’

In trying to reconcile Obama’s (and the author’s) idealism with the administration’s more modest accomplishments, The World As It Is necessarily expounds the limits of presidential power. The ‘vast complex of deployments, alliances, international agreements and budget decisions’ that span decades contributes to the ‘occasional schizophrenia’ in US foreign policy and creates resistance to change. Obama’s room to manoeuvre was reduced further by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had overextended the military and entrenched public opinion against further ‘boots on the ground’ commitments. More fundamental changes were also in motion.

Obama occasionally pointed out that the post-Cold War moment was always going to be transitory … The Iraq War disturbed other countries – including U.S. allies – in its illogic and destruction, and accelerated a realignment of power and influence that was further advanced by the global financial crisis. By the time Obama took office, a global correction had already taken place.

The depredations of the Republican Party loom large. ‘The decorum that usually shielded national security from politics was tossed aside.’ In the midst of negotiations over the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, Republican House Speaker John Boehner invited the deal’s main opponent, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to address Congress on the issue, ‘abandoning any norms about working with a foreign government to undermine the policies of a sitting president’. Rhodes’s severest criticism, however, is reserved for Republican efforts to gain political mileage from the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens during an attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi and the subsequent promotion of ‘an ugly conspiracy theory to delegitimize Obama and Clinton’.

I had grown accustomed to ugly Republican attacks, but this felt different. Some threshold had been crossed. They were slamming us in the crudest possible way in the middle of a crisis. They were attacking career Foreign Service people who had issued a statement while their embassy was under siege … They would say anything if it could cast Obama as somehow anti-American. It wasn’t just politics, it was sickening in its cynicism.

More fundamentally, a quote from Obama himself provides insight into the his caution on the world stage. ‘After I was re-elected, I pulled together a group of presidential historians that I have in from time to time … It’s interesting: They made the point that the most important thing a president can do on foreign policy is avoid a costly error.’

Rhodes is an honest and faithful observer, and a fascinating, if contradictory, portrait of Barack Obama emerges from these pages. However, the reader is often distracted by excursions into Rhodes’s life and preoccupations in the White House. Regrettably, his asides and observations tend to emphasise the author’s sense of his own importance and reveal a smugness about his membership of an élite coterie of young advisers to President Obama.

Yes We (Still) Can: Politics in the age of Obama, Twitter, and Trump, by former White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer, is a salty political playbook that provides a diagnosis of the Democratic defeat in 2016, maps a new media landscape, and offers a punchy and motivational guide from the Obama campaigns on how to fight back against Trump’s Republican Party.

Much of the book covers topics that have been better addressed elsewhere – for instance, the foundations of the success of the 2008 Obama campaign (The Audacity to Win by David Plouffe [2009]); the corrupting impact of Fox News on the American media landscape (The Fox Effect by David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt [2012]); and evidence of the growing extremism in the Republican Party (It’s Even Worse Than It Looks by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein [2012]). However, Pfeiffer brings real insight to what he calls ‘The New Media Wasteland’. He charts the disaggregation of political media in the United States and identifies how right-wing conspiracy theories and falsehoods make their way from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream through Facebook, Twitter, and the commercial imperatives of established media outlets.

President Barack Obama talks with (from left) Press Secretary Jay Carney and Director of Communications Dan Pfeiffer (photograph by by Pete Souza/Wikimedia Commons)

Pfeiffer argues that President Obama was on the frontlines of a rapidly changing media ecosystem and that the techniques developed by Obama and his team to combat fake news (about Obamacare, the president’s birth certificate, the Benghazi affair) can be deployed to defeat Donald Trump, who is ‘an expert at saying and tweeting the things that would dominate the conversation on Twitter and then across the media landscape’.

The book is also a call to arms. In Pfeiffer’s telling,

[T]his Republican Party is incapable of working with Democrats. Their rabid base will not allow it … [U]ntil the defeat of the cancer at the heart of the Republican Party, confrontation is the only option. Bipartisanship is dead. The Republicans killed it. If we want to make progress, we’ve got to beat the Republicans at the ballot box, elect more Democrats, and move this country forward without the help.

Yes We (Still) Can offers tantalising insights into how an agile, tech-savvy Obama campaign might have handled the Trump phenomenon, but it is ultimately too superficial, its tone too jokey, to deliver much substance. Nevertheless, Pfeiffer’s hyper-partisan, profanity-laced romp through the new media landscape is not dull.

Certain common threads do emerge from these very different books – a love for Barack Obama, anger at the election of Donald Trump, and a sometimes melancholic, sometimes pugnacious sense of unfinished business. Yet, for different reasons, both whet, rather than satisfy, an appetite to know more about the presidency of Barack Obama. 

What is it that so fascinates us about lost children? Whether fact or fiction, their stories keep surfacing: Azaria Chamberlain, Jaidyn Leskie, the Beaumont children, or the schoolgirls Joan Lindsay dreamed up for her 1967 novel Picnic at Hanging Rock. Indeed, those girls have wafted through so many subsequent incarnations in books, a play, a film, and a television series that some people are convinced they were real and that the story of their disappearance is true.

The discovery of human bones is an intriguing narrative opening that rarely disappoints and seems an adaptable vehicle for the Australian gothic and representations of the impacts of colonisation on people and country. Perhaps this is because the image of curved, white mineral shapes (and the hint of stories fossilised within) contrast equally vividly with sandy coastal plains, central red dust, bleak mountain scarps, and dense green forest.

Amanda Curtin’s The Sinkings (2008) begins with a grisly murder in 1882 and the ‘discovery’ of bones in a remote location near Albany along Western Australia’s south coast. Steve Hawke kicks off The Valley in a similar vein. First the discovery in the present of the bones, which are found ‘with arms folded, at peace’, and then back to 1916 to a murder in a different menacing location named Poison Hole, in the Kimberley. Like The Sinkings, The Valley jumps back and forth over a century, focalising through the perspectives of different characters and filling in the back-story through archival material (in this novel, the ‘fragile, yellowed papers: The Last Will & Testament of William Noakes’, the family’s unfortunate patriarch). The result is a multivocal contemplation of the significance of what is found.

In the first few pages of Cedar Valley, a group of women gather together to console one another after a calamitous event shatters the predictable languor of their small rural town. Pulling chairs into a circle, they pour glasses of brandy in the soft light of early evening and reflect on the day’s events, offering succour and speculation as the sky darkens around them. It is this compelling sense of community, with its intricate webs and unexpected bonds, its deep sweetness and complicated anguish, that is at the heart of Holly Throsby’s new novel. Cedar Valley is essentially a charming epic of intimacy; it is this moving affirmation of the sustaining grace of community that animates and enlivens this impressive work.

Virtuosic performance text, palimpsest of a nineteenth-century Russian folktale, and a merciless and often very funny sectioning of the self, Ania Walwicz’s horse enacts what it names: ‘Polyphony as identity’. The narrative more or less follows the story of The Little Humpbacked Horse by Piotr Jerszow, in which a magical horse repeatedly helps Ivan, a foolish young farm boy, towards his fairy-tale ending. In Walwicz’s wilder and more fragmentary retelling, the protagonist’s identity comprises both horse and rider, tsar and groom, tyrant and the tyrannised, abused child and academic, the self of fiction and the ‘autobiographical’. The effect is almost Cubist, in that all of these facets are visible without becoming a settled, realist literary image.

The poet James McAuley once told a group of Sydney university students – ‘forcefully’,  as Geoffrey Lehmann recalls – that poets should have a career unconnected with literature. Lehmann had already imbibed a related injunction from his mother:  ‘One day she told me I should become a lawyer and a writer. From the age of twelve I no longer had to think about what I would become.’

Most of the time, plays are just entertainments; they can be witty and insightful, even powerful and contemporary, and still function as merely satisfying divertissements. Rarely, so rarely entire decades can pass without one, a play functions in an entirely different capacity: these are works so galvanising they seem to presage, if not actually bring about, socio-political change. Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879) was one; Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) is undeniably another; and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A gay fantasia on national themes is probably the greatest of the modern era. A new book, The World Only Spins Forward (2018), edited by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois, aims to contextualise, honour, and perhaps even lionise this monumental masterpiece. It paints an overarching portrait – in a gathered testimony by the people who worked on, wrote about, and/or witnessed it – of the play’s cultural roots and its progression into the American theatrical canon.

There is an eerie sameness to addiction memoirs, which tend to follow the same basic structure. In the beginning, there is some immense and unassuageable pain, followed by the discovery of one substance or another that dulls some of that pain. Then comes the dawning realisation that this anaesthetising substance is itself causing more pain than it relieves – to oneself, to society, and to those about whom one cares about most. The next act is the attempt to live without the substance, and to gain a new relation to the pain that caused the addiction in the first place.

Though the details differ considerably, this structure holds for the majority of addiction memoirs. In broad terms, it’s also true of Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. Yet what makes Jamison’s book such a remarkable and original contribution to the genre is the sheer intellectual firepower she brings to her subject matter, and the hybrid form she invents in order to present it. The book is eccentric and uncategorisable – in equal parts a personal history of addiction and recovery, a complex argument about the broader history of addiction narratives in US culture, and an exploration of literary representations of alcoholism in American letters. Jamison applies a rigorous and disciplined intellect to all three strands, crafting a compelling narrative that shows many of the intersections between her own experiences and larger cultural forces.